C. S. Lewis Quotes

We shall never learn to know ourselves except by endeavoring to know God; for, beholding His greatness we realize our own littleness; His purity shows us our foulness; and by meditating upon His humility we find how very far we are from being humble.

The law is about you looking at yourself. The new covenant is all about you seeing Jesus.

Self knowledge puts us on our knees, and it is very necessary for love. For knowledge of God gives love, and knowledge of self gives humility

So we can only know God well by knowing our iniquities. Therefore those who have known God, without knowing their wretchedness, have not glorified Him, but have glorified themselves.

It's strange how deserts turn us into believers. I believe in walking in a landscape of mirages, because you learn humility. I believe in living in a land of little water because life is drawn together. And I believe in the gathering of bones as a testament to spirits that have moved on. If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.

We think we understand another person's struggle until God reveals the same shortcomings in our lives.

They that know God will be humble. They that know themselves cannot be proud.

Know thyself, for through thyself only thou canst know God.

The first step to improvement, whether mental, moral, or religious, is to know ourselves - our weaknesses, errors, deficiencies, and sins, that, by divine grace, we may overcome and turn from them all.

We become contemplatives when God discovers Himself in us.

Seek for illumination of self, and then the world, through the simple, humble, almighty, supreme virtue of love.

Jesus Christ said, 'I pray your faith will not fail.' This means your faith will be tested. What is testing your faith right now?

Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness.

Someone once told me that the finer points of devotion are about the size of a pinhole, and there are millions of them. And if you could connect each dot, then you’ve got a diagram of what you think you thought you knew, and if you’re willing to admit that you know nothing…you have the blueprint for a breakthrough.

Because You have called me here not to wear a label by which I can recognize myself and place myself in some kind of a category. You do not want me to be thinking about what I am, but about what You are. Or rather, You do not even want me to be thinking about anything much: for You would raise me above the level of thought. And if I am always trying to figure out what I am and where I am and why I am, how will that work be done?

Learn the lesson of your own pain--learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love.

To begin with oneself but not to end with onself. To start from oneself but not to aim at oneself.

He who knows himself knows god.

The height of all philosophy is to know thyself; and the end of this knowledge is to know God.

To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self.

To seek yourself in this world is to be lost; and to be humble is to be exalted.