C. S. Lewis on Religion

"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."

"“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade, the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito."

"Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although He does not, on their view, exist..."

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

"PBS | The Question of God A look at the lives of C.S. Lewis and of Sigmund Freud, analyzing the "question of God"

"He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods."

"As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul."

"God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love."

"Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind."

"ReligionFacts.com: C.S. Lewis Fast facts, timeline, summary of works"

"God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real."

"God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself."

"Not my idea of God, but God."

"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."

"It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls."

"What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard."

"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. 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."

"What can you ever really know of other people's souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books."

"You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself , 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—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens."

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England."

"I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had."