C. S. Lewis Needs Quotations

Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.

Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.

God loves us NOT because we're lovable, because He is love. Not because He needs to receive, because He delights to give.

One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.

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.

Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins.

Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?

In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give.

I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change #‎ God - it changes me.

It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been "had for a sucker" by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.

The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.

The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.

If He who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.

Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly.

We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord - and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.

Why you fool, it's the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles....He's our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.

After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required.

When we want to be something other than the thing that God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy...whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

Most people don't need to be taught, they need only to be reminded

No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly

Need-love says of a woman, "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection...appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.

So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man...

Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life.