“Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
This pithy saying, attributed to the famed British writer C. S. Lewis, has widely circulated the internet in the last decade. The only problem is, he didn’t say it. It appeared in Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life, and another version cropped up a few years earlier in This Was Your Life! Preparing to Meet God Face to Face by Rick Howard and Jamie Lash. “Real humility is not thinking less of ourselves; it is thinking of ourselves less,” they wrote before quoting Lewis on the topic.
Howard and Lash’s summary of Lewis’s thinking and Warren’s rephrasing has become one of the most common quotes wrongly attributed to Lewis.
Numerous fake C. S. Lewis quotes have gone viral in recent years thanks to the power of social media. Many are pointedly applicable to the present cultural moment. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a letter purporting to be from The Screwtape Letters filled Facebook feeds. In the false letter, a demon claims, “The world turned into a concentration camp, without forcing any of them into captivity.” And in recent election seasons, another fake Screwtape letter circulated, congratulating the junior demon on keeping a person “completely fixated on politics.”
Other false Lewis quotes can even make him appear to put forth theologically disputable claims, like this quote, referenced by big-name leaders and cycled with regularity: “You do not have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.” It remains one of the most controversial.
Some popular misattributed Lewis quotes are even further removed from his actual words. Motivational phrases like “You are never too old to set another goal or dream a new dream” are frequently credited to Lewis. According to William O’Flaherty, author of The Misquotable C. S. Lewis, one of the more bizarre recent misattributions is “Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you never know who would love the person you hide.”
O’Flaherty has become synonymous with debunking misquotes of C. S. Lewis ever since he began correcting them in his blog and on social media. His first experience with a misattributed Lewis quote, however, was his own.
“Despite the fact that I had read nearly all of his works at that point, I often did what people do now,” O’Flaherty said. “I’d see a quote credited to Lewis, liked what it said, and shared it without considering whether he was the author or not.”
In 2010, a Lewis scholar reached out to O’Flaherty about one of the inspiring quotes he’d shared on his blog. It wasn’t actually Lewis. “So I guess you could say I first noticed quotes misattributed to Lewis by being an offender.”
Today, O’Flaherty works to correct misattributed and out-of-context C. S. Lewis quotes, a role that increasingly seems never-ending, as Lewis quickly became one of the most misquoted writers. It appears the only thing social media and internet searches love more than a C. S. Lewis quote is a fake C. S. Lewis quote.
Michael Ward, C. S. Lewis scholar at Oxford University and author of Planet Narnia, said part of the reason Lewis is so misquoted is because he’s so quotable.
“He is a great writer who puts things pithily and memorably,” Ward said. “As soon as someone is recognized as ‘quotable,’ all sorts of quotes they didn’t say, and that perhaps nobody said, but which the speaker wishes someone had said, get attributed to them.”
Lewis wrote so widely and extensively that many simply assume any quote attributed to him could be from him. Ward said the false attributions can arise from laziness, ignorance, or simple guesswork. Quotes widely attributed to Lewis may range from paraphrases of his actual writing to the words of others that somehow became attached to him to quotes created to appear as if they belong to Lewis.
Our picture of his misquotes may be limited to misattributed words on X or a speciously claimed quote plastered over an image of Lewis on Instagram, but that’s not where they started. And unfortunately, they’re not limited to those spaces either.
Before he was himself quotable and misquotable, Lewis had already been exposed to the problem of misattribution. Ward noted that in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, Lewis mentions hearing his Irish father relay anecdotes about an Irish scholar. Later, at Oxford, he heard those same stories attached to a British scholar.
When Lewis began his writing and speaking career, criticism of his work occasionally veered into mischaracterization, according to Harry Lee Poe, author of a trilogy of C. S. Lewis biographies. “The problem of misrepresentation arose from time to time from those who attacked Lewis,” said Poe, “and he just as regularly replied or responded in an article or letter to the editor.”
That was the case when Lewis drew the ire of Norman Pittenger, a progressive Anglican theologian and professor of apologetics at General Theological Seminary in New York. In the October 1958 Christian Century, Pittenger wrote a piece attacking Lewis’s approach to apologetics and theology.
The magazine’s editor sent the piece to Lewis and offered to reprint his reply. In his response, Lewis granted a handful of Pittenger’s minor complaints but challenged most of what he wrote. Particularly, Lewis wrote that the American professor had misquoted and misunderstood what Lewis had said in Miracles.
Wheaton College professor Clyde Kilby wrote a defense of Lewis in the December 1958 issue of Christianity Today and sent his response to Lewis. In his letters to Kilby and others, Lewis was much more forceful in his criticism of Pittenger. In one, Lewis wrote that he found it “hard to stomach the fact that, while contradicting nearly every article of the Creed, he continues to receive money as a professor of Christian apologetics.” Elsewhere, he said, “While one can respect a straightforward atheist, it is hard not to hate a man who takes money for defending Christianity and spends his time attacking it.”
Lewis’s misquotes may have started with his ideological opponents, but they spread to his seeming admirers even before social media. When O’Flaherty began researching false attributions, he traced many to pre-internet sources. “I discovered that part of the problem originated from books and articles,” he said.
The problem of fake quotes remained somewhat isolated with printed text. However, C. S. Lewis misquotes grew exponentially with the explosion of social media in the early 2000s.
Not long after sharing his own fake Lewis quote, O’Flaherty said he began to make a list of misattributed quotes. “It went from five to ten rather quickly and kept growing,” he said. By late 2012, he noticed those fake quotes were becoming an issue. He wrote an article debunking some of the most popular misquotes he’d seen. By 2016, confusion around what Lewis actually said had only increased, leading O’Flaherty to write his book.
This problem has gotten even more tricky in the last couple years. Just as the rise of social media in the early 2000s allowed more quotes to spread divorced from their correct source, the advent of generative artificial intelligence has now made it possible for fake quotes to be simulated in Lewis’s own voice. Such deepfake videos provide new avenues for confusion and deception.
There are no known videos of Lewis, and only a few audio recordings of him remain. Yet several modern videos have been produced in the last couple years appearing to feature extended clips of Lewis offering self-help motivational advice. The description for one video reads, “Embrace C.S. Lewis’ advice and ‘learn to act as if nothing bothers you’—a skill that can unlock a deeper level of peace, joy, and fulfillment in your life.”
However, a few paragraphs further down in the description, the channel reveals the video was “created using a synthesized voice that does not belong to him.” Entire YouTube channels are dedicated to producing computer-generated content in the simulated voice of well-known thinkers like Lewis.
As Christians navigate a growing sea of misattribution, it helps to remember why Lewis became so quotable in the first place. His desire was to communicate truth, not try to be memorable. “Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original,” he wrote in Mere Christianity, “whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
Part of his success in being original and memorable in how he communicated truth came from an area of his life that could be considered a failure. “Lewis had hoped to be a poet,” Poe said, “but his poetry tended to be technically well crafted but not quite what he regarded as great poetry. Yet Lewis’s prose has a remarkable poetic quality to it that rises above the mundane.”
As others quote and misquote Lewis, Ward said he might see it as an indirect compliment. “This is the almost predictable fate of any figure who achieves a certain stature, to serve as a convenient magnet for stories or quotations that other people want to perpetuate, however inaccurately,” he said. “But as a historian who respected source material, Lewis would also prefer it if people bothered to be accurate.”
In O’Flaherty’s eyes, the temptation to misquote Lewis or share quotes without checking the attribution often comes from a desire to use the cachet of someone respected simply to provide personal confirmation. “Frankly speaking, too many people have a bumper sticker attention span,” O’Flaherty wrote in his book. “And typically, they love quotes because quotes give them the ‘sound bite’ that confirms something they already believe.”
Modern forms of media for communication, like social media and YouTube videos, provide us with ample opportunity for both belief confirmation and affirmation. “Today, when a person shares a quote misattributed to Lewis, it may get several thousand likes and a thousand or more shares in less than a day,” O’Flaherty said. “The fake quote just spreads like wildfire.”
Whether people are intentionally deceptive in their misquoting of Lewis or lazily unaware, the man himself would argue that the pursuit of truth is always worth the extra effort.
As he wrote in Mere Christianity, “If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth—only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.” (That’s in Book I, Chapter 5—“We Have Cause to Be Uneasy”—page 39 in my edition, if you need to check.)
So the next time you hear someone say, “As C. S. Lewis once said,” make sure you ask them for a source.
Aaron Earls writes about faith, culture, and C. S. Lewis at The Wardrobe Door. He is also the senior writer for Lifeway Research.
