“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”
― John Milton, Paradise LostC.S. Lewis: What He Said, What He Didn’t Say, and Why It Matters
Christianity Today: Mere Misattribution? Why We Misquote C.S. Lewis, by Aaron Earls (The Wardrobe Door: Faith, Culture, and C. S. Lewis):
As the famous British author once said, crediting people with things they never said says something about us.
“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.” …
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
