Mere Christianity By C S Lewis Quotes & Sayings

In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis argues that human beings cannot be truly good or moral without faith in God and without submis- sion to the will of Christ. Unfortunately, Lewis does not provide any actual data for his assertions. They are nothing more than the mild musings of a wealthy British man, pondering the state of humanity's soul between his sips of tea. Had Lewis actually famil- iarized himself with real human beings of the secular sort, per- haps sat and talked with them, he would have had to reconsider this notion. As so many apostates explained to me, morality is most certainly possible beyond the confines of faith. Can people be good without God? Can a moral orientation be sustained and developed outside of a religious context? The answer to both of these questions is a resounding yes. — Phil Zuckerman

And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. — C.S. Lewis

The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back to a lesson that it wants to shirk. — C.S. Lewis

The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility ... According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. — C.S. Lewis

I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out truth. — C.S. Lewis

Love is the great conqueror of lust. — C.S. Lewis

Jack prepared another needle with the antibiotics.
"You're not sticking me with that."
"Come on. It'll only hurt for a second, and I'll get to look under that sheet again."
"Jack, I'm not kidding. I don't like shots. Enough already."
"You need the medicine. Now gimme your cheek."
"Ha. Ha. Very funny."
She let him give her the shot and stuck her tongue out when he finished. He loved how easily she made him laugh.
"Smart ass."
"Sore ass is more like it." — Jennifer Ryan

In the end, then, suffrage for women came down to the vote of one young man, influenced by his mom. It was rumored that "the anti-suffragists were so angry at his decision that they chased him from the chamber, forced him to climb out a window of the Capitol and inch along a ledge to safety."15 Thus suffrage arrived in the United States, kicking and screaming. — Michael Shermer

Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. — C.S. Lewis

In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble
because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out. - Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. — C.S. Lewis

God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. — C.S. Lewis

You don't need to be recluse and stay away from people. But you have to set aside a lot of time for stillness. That is the only place there is real fulfillment. You need to slow it down. — Frederick Lenz

Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive. - C. S. LEWIS, MERE CHRISTIANITY — Sheila Walsh

Suggestions for further reading Karen Armstrong, Jerusalem; Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones; Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha; Deepak Chopra, God: A Story of Revelation; Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet; Lawrence Kushner, Kabbalah: A Love Story; C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity; Krista Tippett, Speaking of Faith; Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now — Paulo Coelho

We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. — C.S. Lewis

A Pleasant Theology One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of the emotional comfort of believing in God and none of the less pleasant consequences. When you are feeling fit and the sun is shining and you do not want to believe that the whole universe is a mere mechanical dance of atoms, it is nice to be able to think of this great mysterious Force rolling on through the centuries and carrying you on its crest. If, on the other hand, you want to do something rather shabby, the Life-Force, being only a blind force, with no morals and no mind, will never interfere with you like that troublesome God we learned about when we were children. The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? - from Mere Christianity — C.S. Lewis

Let us suppose that such a person began by observing those Christian activities which are, in a sense, directed towards this present world. He would find that this religion had, as a mere matter of historical fact, been the agent which preserved such secular civilization as survived the fall of the Roman Empire; that to it Europe owes the salvation, in those perilous ages, of civilized agriculture, architecture, laws, and literacy itself. He would find that this same religion has always been healing the sick and caring for the poor; that it has, more than any other, blessed marriage; and that arts and philosophy tend to flourish in its neighborhood. In a word, it is always either doing, or at least repenting with shame for not having done, all the things which secular humanitarianism enjoins. If our enquirer stopped at this point he would have no difficulty in classifying Christianity - giving it its place on a map of the 'great religions. — C.S. Lewis

[God] sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. — C.S. Lewis

And yes, you will die, but probably not until everyone you know is already dead too. Your parents, your friends, your pets, each death leaving a small but irreparable scar on your not yet still, still-beating heart. The living tell the dying not to leave and the dying do not listen. The dying tell us not to be sad for them and we do not listen. The dialogue between the living and the dead is full of misunderstanding and — Joseph Fink

You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity) — George MacDonald

Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog. — C.S. Lewis

The ideas that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing- one huge organism, like a tree-must not be confused with the idea that individual difference is not important or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are some how less important than collective things like classes, races and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things which are parts of a single organism may be very different form one another: things which are not, may be very alike. Six pennies are quite separate and very alike: my nose and my lungs are very different but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life. Christianity thinks of individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body- different from one another and each contributing what no other could. — C.S. Lewis

As an atheist evolving to agnosticism, and seeking answers to whether or not belief in God is potentially rational, my life was turned upside down 35 years ago by reading C. S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. — Francis Collins

I destroy the image after I've made it, obliterate it a little so you never have it completely there. — Deborah Turbeville

You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled. — C.S. Lewis

The two saddest moments of my life were when my mother died and when I was told I couldn't play football for the Colts anymore. — Art Donovan

A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems. — C.S. Lewis

In Mere Christianity, no less than in his more fantastical works, the Narnia stories and science fiction novels, Lewis betrays a deep faith in the power of the human imagination to reveal the truth about our condition and bring us to hope. "The longest way round is the shortest way home"2 is the logic of both fable and of faith. — C.S. Lewis

Funny how it all turns to theological babble the more we try to identify just exactly what we're talking about with this whole law business. No wonder C.S. Lewis wrote a story instead! Sure, he tackled the issue of moral law in Mere Christianity too. But nothing sticks in our imaginations quite so clearly as the sight of the White Witch, her bare arms raised above her head, standing over the willing, innocent, self-sacrificing Lion on the Stone Table. — Sarah Arthur

Real Americans don't back down. — Ted Nugent

You were a summer gift, one I'll always treasure. You were a dream I never wanted to wake up from. You opened my eyes to things I'll never really see. You're the best thing that will ever happen to me. — Ellen Hopkins