Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis
“You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream”
“On a great day the thing that makes it great may fill the least part of it—as a meal takes little time to eat, but the killing, baking, and dressing, and the swilling and scraping after it, take long enough.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Till We Have Faces
“Every dictator or even demagogue—almost every film-star or crooner—can now draw tens of thousands of the human sheep with him. They give themselves (what there is of them) to him; in him, to us. There may come a time when we shall have no need to bother about individual temptation at all, except for the few. Catch the bell-wether and his whole flock comes after him.”
“The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.”
“Have you forgotten what we are to say to ourselves every morning? 'Today I shall meet cruel men, cowards and liars, the envious and the drunken. They will be like that because they do not know what is good from what is bad. This is an evil which has fallen upon them not upon me. They are to be pitied, not...”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Till We Have Faces
“I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Till We Have Faces
topics: love
“Debo mantener vivo en mí mismo el deseo de mi verdadero país, que no encontraré hasta después de mi muerte; jamás debo dejar que se oculte o se haga a un lado; debo hacer que el principal objetivo de mi vida sea seguir el rumbo que me lleve a ese país y ayudar a los demás a hacer lo mismo.»”
“To be a queen-that would not sweeten the bitter water against which I had been building the dam in my soul. It might strengthen the dam, though.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Till We Have Faces
topics: orual
“I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The”
“Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”
“He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent... by exploiting his vanity. He can... enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a "deeper," "spiritual" world within him which they can not understand. You see the idea - the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of same, a continual under-current of self-satisfaction... and that to cease to do so would be "priggish," "intolerant," and... "Puritanical.”
“The new oligarchy must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists until in the end the politicians become merely the scientists’ puppets.”
“You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Till We Have Faces
topics: spiritual
“And we said we loved her.” “And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us.” - Queen Orual and The Fox”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Till We Have Faces
topics: till-we-have-faces
“the loving and the devouring are all one”
“Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy—that is, to reality. Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Great Divorce
“Hours later there came a change. It began to grow light in the bus. The greyness outside the windows turned from mud-colour to mother of pearl, then to faintest blue, then to a bright blueness that stung the eyes. We seemed to be floating in a pure vacancy. There were no lands, no sun, no stars in sight: only the radiant abyss.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Great Divorce
“He therefore, I believe, wants them to attend chiefly to two things, to eternity itself, and to that point of time which they call the Present. For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. Of the present moment, and of it only, humans have an experience analogous to the experience which our Enemy has of reality as a whole; in it alone freedom and actuality are offered them. He would therefore have them continually concerned either with eternity (which means being concerned with Him) or with the Present—either meditating on their eternal union with, or separation from, Himself, or else obeying the present voice of conscience, bearing the present cross, receiving the present grace, giving thanks for the present pleasure.”
“Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it’s ill talking of such questions.’ ‘Because they are too terrible, Sir?’ ‘No. Because all answers deceive.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Great Divorce
topics: theology
“I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. There”
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Clive Staples Lewis was born in Ireland, in Belfast on 29 November 1898. His mother was a devout Christian and made efforts to influence his beliefs. When she died in his early youth her influence waned and Lewis was subject to the musings and mutterings of his friends who were decidedly agnostic and atheistic. It would not be until later, in a moment of clear rationality that he first came to a belief in God and later became a Christian.
C. S. Lewis volunteered for the army in 1917 and was wounded in the trenches in World War I. After the war, he attended university at Oxford. Soon, he found himself on the faculty of Magdalen College where he taught Mediaeval and Renaissance English.
Throughout his academic career he wrote clearly on the topic of religion. His most famous works include the Screwtape Letters and the Chronicles of Narnia. The atmosphere at Oxford and Cambridge tended to skepticism. Lewis used this skepticism as a foil. He intelligently saw Christianity as a necessary fact that could be seen clearly in science.
"Surprised by Joy" is Lewis's autobiography chronicling his reluctant conversion from atheism to Christianity in 1931.