C.S. Lewis Quotes on God (37 Quotes)


    No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

    There have been men before à who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himselfà as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.


    And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.



    Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.

    Oh, I can see it happening, age after age, and growing worse the more you reveal your beauty: the son turning his back on the mother and the bride on her groom, stolen away by this everlasting calling, calling, calling of the gods. Taken where we can't follow. It would be far better for us if you were foul and ravening. We'd rather you drank their blood than stole their hearts. We'd rather they were ours and dead than yours and made immortal.



    God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger - according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way.

    If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.

    My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

    Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won't last forever. We must take it or leave it.

    The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred

    The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

    The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.

    She looked at a silver birch: it would have a soft, showery voice and would look like a slender girl, with hair blown all about her face and fond of dancing. She looked at the oak: he would be a wizened, but hearty, old man with a frizzled beard and warts on his fact and hands, with hair growing out of the warts. She looked at the beech under which she was standing. Ah! --she would be the best of all. She would be a gracious goddess, smooth and stately, the Lady of the Wood.

    Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

    Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

    God will invade. But I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks on to the stage the play is over. God is going to invade, all right but what is the good of saying you are on His side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream and something else - something it never entered your head to conceive - comes crashing in something so beautiful to some of us and so terrible to others that none of us will have any choice left For this time it will God without disguise something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing it will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

    The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.

    God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.

    It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.

    That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.

    Is it easy to love God' asks an old author. 'It is easy,' he replies, 'to those who do it.' I have included two Graces under the word Charity. But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible.

    God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world

    As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.

    I could well believe that it is God's intention, since we have refused milder remedies, to compel usinto unity, by persecution even and hardship. Satan is without a doubt nothing else than a hammer in thehand of a benevolent and severe God. For all, eithe

    There is but one good that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

    The perfect church service, would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.

    Though our feelings come and go, Gods love for us does not.

    God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.

    I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing thatpeople often say about Him I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moralteacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God. That is the one thing wemust not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesussaid would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on alevel with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be theDevil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, theSon of God or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for afool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon or you can fall at Hisfeet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronisingnonsense about His being a great moral teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

    The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.

    God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.

    It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us it is the very sign of His presence.

    God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.


    More C.S. Lewis Quotations (Based on Topics)


    God - Man - World - Christianity - Love - Work & Career - Life - Mind - Religions & Spirituality - Books - Time - Sense & Perception - Vice & Virtue - Good & Evil - People - Joy & Excitement - Pleasure - Dreams - Present - View All C.S. Lewis Quotations

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    - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
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    - The Screwtape Letters
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    - Till We Have Faces: A Novel of Cupid and Psyche

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