Few writers manage to pack as much wisdom into a single paragraph as C. S. Lewis. The British writer and close friend of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings, wrote with rare clarity about love, faith and the uncomfortable truths of being human. His work is dense without being dry. Every line pulls its weight, every insight cuts a little deeper than expected. Honest, sharp and often surprisingly funny, Lewis had a gift for saying the hard things in a way that sticks with you.
Hard-Hitting C.S. Lewis Quotes
Here are 15 C.S. Lewis quotes about life, love, courage, friednship and human nature.
1. Friendship
A simple yet powerful portrayal of friendship. Sometimes, the smallest discoveries change how we connect with others.
Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two of more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest of even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
2. Courage
What does it mean to truly live a virtue? Lewis hints it all comes down to courage.
[C]ourage 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.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
3. Reading
What if you could see “with a myriad eyes”? C.S. Lewis explores how books let us live far beyond ourselves.
Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison.
My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented… In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism
4. Truth
Seek truth over comfort.
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.
C. S. Lewis
5. Love
This C.S. Lewis quote about life reminds us of the dilemma at the heart of love. To hold it close is to risk heartbreak, but to avoid it is to harden your soul.
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or cofin of your selfishness.
But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, air-less – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves
6. Your Real Life
What if life isn’t just what you plan it to be?
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s ‘own’ or one’s ‘real life. The truth is, of course, that what one calls interruptions are precisely one’s real life.
C. S. Lewis, Collected Works
7. Power Struggles
A lesser-discussed quote from C.S. Lewis on what makes Tolkien’s tale The Lord of the Rings so profound.
The central theme of the book is the contrast between the Hobbits (or “the Shire”) and the appalling destiny to which some of them are called, the terrifying discovery that the humdrum happiness of the Shire, which they had taken for granted as something normal, is in reality a sort of local and temporary accident, that its existence depends on being protected by powers which Hobbits forget, against powers which Hobbits dare not imagine.
C.S. Lewis, The Gods Return to Earth
8. Creativity
With the paradox of originality, Lewis has an unexpected recipe for true creativity.
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
9. Grief
In this C.S. Lewis quote about life, the author reflects on the profound grief he felt after his wife’s death.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed
10. Love Again
What is love?
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
C. S. Lewis
11. True Evil
What does evil look like in the modern world? It’s found where you least expect it.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
12. Stupidity
In this C.S. Lewis quote from the first book of the Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis delivers a reminder that self-sabotage is deceptively easy. (Unless you have mastered the Columbo Method.)
The problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you so very often succeed.
C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew
13. Good & Evil
C.S. Lewis reminds us that in the moral landscape, every decision matters. Even the ones that seem trivial.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
14. Temptation
C.S. Lewis turns a common assumption upside down: only those who struggle know the full weight of good and evil.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in.
You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
C. S. Lewis
15. Fallacy
What if most arguments miss the point entirely? C.S. Lewis coined a logical fallacy for that, which is often seen as the foundation of 20th-century thought.
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”.
C. S. Lewis, Bulverism
BONUS 1: Food
C.S. Lewis on the perfect bliss of books and bites.
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
C. S. Lewis
BONUS 2: Encouragement
Even a genius needs a champion. Here’s J.R.R. Tolkien crediting Lewis’s friendship and encouragement for helping him finish The Lord of the Rings.
Lewis was a very impressionable man, and this was abetted by his great generosity and capacity for friendship. The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Closing Thoughts
Clive Staples Lewis (yes, that’s his full name) didn’t just hand out advice. He made us stop and really think about the life we’re living. These C.S. Lewis quotes about life aren’t just nice words to nod at; they’re little nudges to pay attention, act deliberately and live with purpose.
