70 C.S. Lewis Quotes on a Life Lived With Purpose & Love

Let these insightful C.S. Lewis quotes change how you perceive the world, society, and yourself!

Clive Staples Lewis was a writer and lay theologian famous for being the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. But, aside from his fantasy novels, he is also exceptionally known for his works about Christianity and faith.

He opened discussions about sin, the fall of man, and redemption, which are all important topics to cover if we want to become better individuals.

Even after his death, most of his works continue to captivate many readers. His imagination and how he crafted words show how good of a writer he was. As people say, words have the power to change one’s life, and C.S. Lewis did just that.

So, don’t miss out on this fantastic quote collection by checking out C.S. Lewis’s life-changing words about life, dreams, and more. Keep on reading below to learn more from the author.

Let’s get started.

Best C.S. Lewis Quotes

1. “You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.”

2. “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

3. “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”

4. “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

5. “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”

6. “Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God, do you learn.”

7. “You can’t know. You can only believe or not.”

8. “What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.”

9. “Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

10. “When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”

11. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

12. “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth, only soft soap, and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

13. “Isn’t it funny how day by day, nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.”

14. “Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life, and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day, and death of your whole body. In the end, submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.”

15. “We are what we believe we are.”

Famous C.S. Lewis Quotes

16. “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

17. “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”

18. “The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that heaven must be our home.”

19. “Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”

20. “Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another ‘What! You too?’ I thought that no one but myself.”

21. “Joy is the serious business of heaven.”

22. “No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.”

23. “Don’t shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him.”

24. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

25. “Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.”

26. “The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go, God’s love for us does not.”

Also read: Famous Quotes, Positive Quotes

Inspirational C.S. Lewis Quotes

27. “Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.”

28. “One road leads home, and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”

29. “Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present. Fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

30. “We are mirrors whose brightness is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.”

31. “You can make anything by writing.”

32. “Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”

33. “Someday, you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

34. “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road, and in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”

Also read: Inspirational Quotes, Encouraging Quotes

C.S. Lewis Quotes on Love

35. “Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life.”

36. “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”

37. “If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly, but it’s still worth it.”

38. “This is one of the miracles of love: it gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”

39. “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries, and avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken. It will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”

Also read: True Love Quotes

C.S. Lewis Quotes on Life

40. “God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.”

41. “The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”

42. “Reality is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.”

43. “Things never happen the same way twice.”

44. “The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to reach the mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from—my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed, it now feels not like going, but like going back.”

45. “If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come.”

Wise C.S. Lewis Quotes for Everyone Who Needs Guidance

46. “The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.”

47. “Don’t let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”

48. “Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours.”

49. “Reason is the natural order of truth, but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

50. “True humility is not thinking less of yourself. It is thinking of yourself less.”

51. “A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.”

52. “Forgiveness does not mean excusing.”

Also read: Oscar Wilde Quotes, Jack Kerouac Quotes

C.S. Lewis Quotes on Friendship

53. “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art. It has no survival value. Rather, it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

54. “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private, and therefore, starved for meditation and true friendship.”

55. “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

C.S. Lewis Quotes That’ll Bring You Closer to God

56. “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”

57. “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”

58. “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it, I see everything else.”

59. “You must ask for God’s help. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.”

60. “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us. We are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”

61. “There is but one good. That is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”

62. “When you are arguing against God, you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.”

63. “God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”

More C.S. Lewis Quotes to Help You Gain a New Perspective

64. “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very.’ Otherwise, you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”

65. “Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.”

66. “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. It is the comparison that makes you proud, the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”

67. “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

68. “Humans are amphibians, half spirit, and half animal. As spirits, they belong to the eternal world, but as animals, they inhabit time.”

69. “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

70. “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”

Did These C.S. Lewis Quotes Inspire You to Have Courage in Life?

Sometimes, our want for comfort and stability hinders us from growth. This kind of desire makes us stagnant and takes away our openness to accept risks in every action and decision we make. Because of that, we become people who don’t dare to do anything that will impact our life significantly.

In reading C.S. Lewis’s quotes, we learn that hardships and failures are a part of life. They are the necessary lessons that we must experience in order to grow and become better individuals. Our downfalls are not things to avoid; they should be treasured and remembered in our lives.

Hopefully, these C.S. Lewis quotes were able to inspire you to dream bigger and be strong during hard times. Most of all, remember that God is always there to hold our hands and guide us toward the light.

Which C.S. Lewis quote is your favorite? Do you have more quotes to add to the collection? Let us know by commenting below!

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Karen Danao

Hi, I’m Karen, a content curator and writer for Quote Ambition; I’m also a marketing and advertising professional. Beyond the keyboard and the screen, I’m someone who’s out to enjoy every bit that life has to offer!

Poetry, philosophy, history, and movies are all topics I love writing about! However, my true passion is in traveling, photography, and finding common ground to which everyone from different cultures can relate.

With the many places I’ve been to, I found that love, inspiration, and happiness are some things that bring people together. No matter how different we are on the outside, I’m a true believer that our emotions don’t lie; if you dig deep into our psyche, we’re all the same inside.

This belief was further amplified when I joined Quote Ambition. Through the quotes I’ve read, collected, organized, and written about, I found that humans are resilient, creative, and compassionate.

We take from each others’ hearts and courage, and it’s through our individual experiences that we learn how to rise above our challenges and pain. In so many ways, Quote Ambition is a platform that allows people from all over the world to gain the inspiration they need anytime, anywhere!

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