C. S. Lewis Quotes

I've always felt like there are certain politicians that wear their religion on their sleeve in a way that you almost feel is disingenuous. I think that your faith has to be first personal. I struggle with those people that preach something and go back behind closed doors and live differently.

I stopped going to mass, and boy, it was painful for me, and it was certainly painful for my family, but I just couldn't ratify their behavior and their decisions anymore by showing up on Sundays.

She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true.

The North American Church is at a critical juncture. The gospel of grace is being confused and compromised by silence, seduction, and outright subversion. The vitality of the faith is being jeopardized. The lying slogans of the fixers who carry religion like a sword of judgment pile up with impunity. Let ragamuffins everywhere gather as a confessing Church to cry out in protest. Revoke the licenses of religious leaders who falsify the idea of God. Sentence them to three years in solitude with the Bible as their only companion.

My experience is that lots of people go to church, sing the songs, tell the story, etc but have profound ambivalence about God.

Though I have usually posed as a Catholic, I have not done my duty for 15 years, and have not the slightest tincture of faith left.

When I was quite a boy I had a spasm of religion which lasted six weeks... But I never since have swallowed the Christian fable.

It is a terribly easy matter to be a minister of the gospel and a vile hypocrite at the same time.

From old habit, unconsciously he thanked God that he no longer believed in Him.

Men talk as if they believed in God, but they live as if they thought there was none; their vows and promises are no more than words, of course.

Often a man goes on for years imaging that the religious teaching that had been imparted to him since childhood is still intact, while all the time there is not a trace of it left in him.

No man is a Christian who cheats his fellows, perverts the truth, or speaks of a "clean bomb" yet he will be the first to make public his faith in God.

You may have orthodox heads, and yet you may have the devil in your hearts.

Because the church has moved away from the gospel anytime you move away from the gospel, you at the same time move toward pretense, you move toward image-keeping, you move toward the need to pretend.

Avoid the base hypocrisy of condemning in one man what you pass over in silence when committed by another.

Every time you have with your mouth said well of godliness, and yet gone on in wickedness; or every time you have condemned sin in others, and yet have not refrained it yourselves; I say, every such word and conclusion that hath passed out of thy mouth, sinner, it shall be as a witness against thee in the day of God, and the Lord Jesus Christ.

I'm amazed at the adolescent nature of some of the religious fanatics in our government. And they're full of double standards.

But then the pastors and men of God can only be human,--cannot altogether be men of God; and so they have oppressed us, and burned us, and tortured us, and hence come to love palaces, and fine linen, and purple, and, alas, sometimes, mere luxury and idleness.

Religion either makes men wise and virtuous, or it makes them set up false pretenses to both.

The clergy [in the 14th century] on the whole were probably no more lecherous or greedy or untrustworthy than other men, but because they were supposed to be better or nearer to God than other men, their failings attracted more attention.

My religious faith remains in possession of the field only after prolonged civil war with my naturally skeptical mind.

Something was badly amiss with the spiritual life of the planet...Too many demons inside people claiming to believe in God.

I was about 12 or 13 years old. I picked up the Bible and read it from cover to cover one weekend ,just as if it were a novel, very rapidly, and I've never gotten over the shock of it. The miracles, the inconsistencies, the improbabilities, the impossibilities, the wretched history, the sordid sex, the sadism in it - the whole thing shocked me profoundly.

Hypocrisy is annoying but not evil. Someone who says one thing and does another has doubled their chances of being half right.

I have more respect for the devil than for some preachers I have met; the devil believes the Bible is the Word of God!