UPDATED (9/8/18) – The Misquotable C.S. Lewis is my book that examines 75 quotations attributed to Lewis that I caution you not to share. Some are falsely attributed to him, others are paraphrases of his words, and a few have context issues. Don’t share a quote attributed to Lewis unless you can confirm he wrote it and the meaning is clear without the context!

The following is a quote I examined that led me to writing The Misquotable C.S. Lewis. I started calling quotes like this as “questionable” because I wanted people to question whether or not Lewis wrote it. This led me to coming up with three main categories, or types of misquotes. You can learn about that in the INTRODUCTION to this series. There is also an “at a glance” page to see what quotations I’ve covered in the online series. Please note that the book has revised entries and provide more details about the expressions examined.  

“Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you
never know who would love the person you hide.”

Is there anyone else who is exactly like you? Of course not! Even if you have a twin sibling, that person is different from you in a variety of ways. Sadly, some do not feel like the unique person God created them to be. That’s why I think the above quotation appeals to so many. It encourages them to take the risk to act differently. Beyond the possible meaning of the expression how do we know C.S. Lewis didn’t write it?

The simple fact is that it is not in any of his published writings. All of his Christian books are available electronically either via Amazon or The C.S. Lewis Collections from Logos. After searching these resources and doing other research on the Internet it can be clearly stated he didn’t pen this statement.

Recently (Nov. 30, 2016) on Facebook in The Official C.S. Lewis Group, someone posted this questionable quotation because it was shared by TobyMac on his FB account (he’s a Christian artist who started out in the group DC Talk, a personal favorite of mine). Some people immediately questioned the legitimacy of the quote, while others (over 80 thousand each liked AND shared it) did not. Why did a few suspect it wasn’t from Lewis? If you have read a lot of his works you are more familiar with his style of writing. While he did write more casually in his letters (that were never intended to be published), he still nearly always avoided stating things over-simplistically.

How did Lewis’ name get attached to it? I’m not sure, but a few places online credit it to unknown. Also, a book by Melanie Young from 2014 entitled Fearless Fabulous You!: Lessons on Living Life on Your Terms says it is not known.

WHAT LEWIS SAID THAT’S RELATED (or closest to it):

“But I do think we are influenced by [Shakespeare] (though the phonetic history is complicated) whenever we use weird as an adjective.”
from The Literary Impact of the Authorised Version (in Selected Literary Essays)

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“There is something weird and desolate about the perfectly round orange coloured sun dropping down clear against a slatey grey sky seen through bare trees that pleases me better than all those cloud-cities and mountains that we used to see in summer over the Lough in the old days when the crows were going home. There never seem to be such sunsets latterly, do there?”
from The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 1 (to his father, Albert Lewis on November 19, 1915)

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“You are probably quite right in thinking that you will never see a miracle done: you are probably equally right in thinking that there was a natural explanation of anything in your past life which seemed, at the first glance, to be ‘rum’ or ‘odd’. God does not shake miracles into Nature at random as if from a pepper-caster.”
from Miracles (Chapter 17) 

The next article is:

“My prayer is that when I die, all of hell rejoices that I am out of the fight.”

Related Articles:

Surprised By Misquotes (2018 Taylor Talk)

Exploring C.S. Lewis Misquotes and Misconceptions (2017 6-part podcast series)

What Lewis NEVER Wrote  (Podcast)

Not Quite Lewis – Podcast Version

Not Quite Lewis – Questionable Lewisian Quotations (Conf. Paper)

Updated 9/8/2018
Originally posted 12/3/2016