10 Favorite C.S. Lewis Quotes of Christian Encouragement

Growing up, I wanted to talk like Anne of Avonlea. She had an extensive vocabulary and a high respect for the beauty of the English language. (She also had a feisty personality, or maybe it was the red hair, that enabled her to make quick witted comments.) Like Anne, I appreciate a creative word choice or metaphor as they enable me to better understand complex mysteries. One of the writers I admire is C.S. Lewis. May his classic writing encourage your faith, or at least make you feel like an erudite savant when you quote him.

Character of God

“Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.” ~ The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

“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 Great Divorce

Friendship

“A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work.  Christ, who said to the disciples “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you” can truly say to every group of Christian friends “You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.”  ~ The Four Loves

“The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.” ~ The Four Loves

Love

“To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly 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 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.  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 danger and perturbations of love is Hell.” ~ The Four Loves

“You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.” ~ The Great Divorce

Our Desires

“We have been like bathers who want to keep their feet – or one foot – or one toe – on the bottom, when to lose that foothold would be to surrender themselves to a glorious tumble in the surf.  The consequences of parting with our last claim to intrinsic freedom, power, or worth, are real freedom, power, and worth.” ~ The Four Loves

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” ~ The Weight of Glory

Heaven

“All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.” ~ The Last Battle

“I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in ‘the High Countries’.” ~ The Great Divorce

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Ready for more food for thought? You might also enjoy Getting Established by faith writer Amy Layne Litzelman.