23 Quotes on Prayer – C.S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was a British writer and Anglican lay theologian. He fell away from his faith when he was a teenager, but returned to the Anglican church when he was 32.

Lewis wrote over 30 books, including many fiction books that were influenced by his faith. Many of his books are cited by a variety of Christian denominations. He offers an honest and transparent view of God, free will, our struggles here on earth, and prayer.

Here are 23 of my favorite C.S. Lewis quotes on prayer.

C.S Lewis Prayer Quotes

“I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God. It changes me.”
– C.S. Lewis

“A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty –and every other moment from the beginning of the world– is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it that way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashed in flames.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want”
– C.S. Lewis

“In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.”
– C.S. Lewis

“You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying – the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.”
– C.S. Lewis

“We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.”
– C.S. Lewis

“We say that we believe God to be omniscient; yet a great deal of prayer seems to consist of giving him information.”
– C.S. Lewis

“And, perhaps, as those who do not turn to God in petty trials will have no habit or such resort to help them when the great trials come, so those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
– C.S. Lewis

“For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.”
– C.S. Lewis

“What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God’s eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.”
– C.S. Lewis

“If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear”
– C.S. Lewis

“Daily prayers and religious reading and churchgoing are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.”
– C.S. Lewis

“The prayer preceding all prayers is ‘May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.’”
– C.S. Lewis

“We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour.”
– C.S. Lewis

“When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn’t been ignored; it’s been considered & refused for your ultimate good.”
– C.S. Lewis

“Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget.”
– C.S. Lewis

“To have Faith in Christ means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.”
– C.S. Lewis

“I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait.”
– C.S. Lewis

“One of the purposes for which God instituted prayer may have been to bear witness that the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of art to which every being makes a conscious contribution, and in which every being is both a means and an end.”
– C.S. Lewis

“In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not.”
– C.S. Lewis