85 C.S. Lewis Quotes On Love, Prayer And More! | Turtle Quotes (2024)

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Shadowlands

“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”

C.S. Lewis

“We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Joyful Christian

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

“I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It’s so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Mere Christianity

“Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.”

C.S. Lewis

“The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.'”

C. S. Lewis
Source: The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis

“The world was made partly that there may be prayer; partly that our prayers might be answered.”

C. S. Lewis

“If God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be now?”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer

“When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn’t been ignored; it’s been considered & refused for your ultimate good.”

C.S. Lewis

“I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: CBN

“Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete person.”

See Also

170 C. S. Lewis Quotes95+ C.S. Lewis Quotes About Love, Life, Faith, Bravery, and FriendshipC. S. Lewis Quotes about loveC.S. Lewis Quotes on Love, Hope, and Integrity

C. S. Lewis
Source: A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis

“Too often, our prayer is self-centered rather than God-centered.”

C. S. Lewis

“Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you’re making.”

C. S. Lewis

“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 worshipping an imaginary God.”

C. S. Lewis

“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.”

C. S. Lewis

“When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.”

C. S. Lewis

“Love is the great conqueror of lust.”

C. S. Lewis

“It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain.”

C. S. Lewis

“A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

C. S. Lewis

“If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

C. S. Lewis

“When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

“Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”

C. S. Lewis

“To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?”

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

“If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.”

C. S. Lewis

“This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there’s a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life.”

C. S. Lewis

“We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”

C. S. Lewis

“For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”

C. S. Lewis

“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.”

C. S. Lewis

“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.”

C. S. Lewis

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.”

C. S. Lewis

“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.”

C. S. Lewis

“All that we call human history–money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery–[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

C. S. Lewis

“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
Source: The Problem of Pain

“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.”

C. S. Lewis

“Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: The Problem of Pain

“Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him.”

C. S. Lewis

“Being in love” first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.”

C. S. Lewis

“You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: The Four Loves

“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: The Screwtape Letters

“Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.”

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

“A woman’s heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.”

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis

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

C. S. Lewis
Source: A Grief Observed

“It is indeed only love that makes the difference: all those very same principles which are evil in the world of selfishness and necessity are good in the world of love and understanding.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: Miracles

“If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: The Four Loves

“Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.”

C. S. Lewis
Source: The Pilgrim’s Regress

“It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.”

C.S. Lewis
Source: Joyful Christian

“She’s the sort of woman who lives for others – you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”

C.S. Lewis

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one–the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,…Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.”

C.S. Lewis

“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.”

C.S. Lewis

“Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.”

C.S. Lewis

“Whatever their bodies do affects their souls. It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out…”

C.S. Lewis

“A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all—and more amusing.”

C.S. Lewis

“Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”

C.S. Lewis

“No man who says, ‘I’m as good as you,’ believes it. He would not say it if he did.”

C.S. Lewis

“I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”

C.S. Lewis

“It is always the novice who exaggerates.”

C.S. Lewis

“You die and you die and then you are beyond death.”

C.S. Lewis

“Devils are depicted with bats’ wings and good angels with birds’ wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.”

C.S. Lewis

“Whenever all men are…hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.”

C.S. Lewis

“The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality.”

C.S. Lewis