C. S. Lewis Quotes About Soul

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

  C. S. Lewis

  First Love, Love Is, Soul

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.319, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Life, Spiritual

• No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

  C. S. Lewis

  Joy, Missing, Soul

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.142, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world.

  C. S. Lewis

  Epic, Soul, Tragedy

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.128, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hands, Always Trying, Soul

• To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love You, First Love, Love Is

• There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.

  C. S. Lewis

  Self, Two, People

  "The Problem of Pain". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1940.

• We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Past, Evil

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Letters to an American Lady”, p.103, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it -- made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Keys, Doors, Hands

• We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world....No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.

  C. S. Lewis

  Pain, Opportunity, Men

• Our souls demand Purgatory, don't they? Would it not break the heart if God said to us, It is true, my son, that your breath smells and your rags drip with mud and slime, but we are charitable here and no one will upbraid you with these things, nor draw away from you. Enter into joy? Should we not reply, With submission, sir, and if there is no objection, I'd rather be cleansed first. It may hurt, you know-even so, sir.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Heart, Son

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.222, Simon and Schuster

• He is not the soul of Nature, nor any part of Nature. He inhabits eternity: He dwells in a high and holy place: heaven is His throne, not his vehicle, earth is his footstool, not his vesture. One day he will dismantle both and make a new heaven and earth. He is not to be identified even with the 'divine spark' in man. He is 'God and not man.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Heaven, Soul

• All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it, tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'

  C. S. Lewis

  Echoes, Soul, Doubt

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Giving Up, Soul, Puppets

  "The Abolition of Man". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1943.

• The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." There is always something they insist on keeping, even at the price of misery.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heaven, Choices, Soul

  "The Great Divorce". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1945.

• Friendship exhibits a glorious "nearness by resemblance" to Heaven itself where the very multitude of the blessed (which no man can number) increases the fruition which each has of God. For every soul, seeing Him in her own way, doubtless communicates that unique vision to all the rest. That, says an old author, is why the Seraphim in Isaiah's vision are crying "Holy, Holy, Holy" to one another (Isaiah VI, 3). The more we thus share the Heavenly Bread between us, the more we shall all have.

  C. S. Lewis

  Blessed, Unique, Men

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

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Soul, Unity

• The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Mean, Soul

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.128, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Thinking, Years

• There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

  C. S. Lewis

  Soul, Suffering, Limits

  C. S. Lewis (1980). “Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold”, p.283, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Reality, Men

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature”, p.183, Cambridge University Press

• What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.

  C. S. Lewis

  Soul, Would Be, Matter

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.120, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, "Here comes one who will augment our loves." For in this love "to divide is not to take away.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Blessed, Jealous

• There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Reality, Men

• Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. He has a body.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Soul, Doe

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