Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis
“For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) ‘having to depend solely on God’ is what we all dread most.”
“I am sure you don’t in fact regard all your duties to the U.S.A. as null and void the moment a party or a President you don’t like is in power. At what point the policy of one’s own country becomes so manifestly wicked that all one’s duties to it cease, I don’t know. But surely mere disapproval is not enough? One must be able to say, ‘What the State now demands of me is contrary to my plain moral duty.”
“The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.”
“Yes, I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch, one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither, but have everything else (God, our fellow-humans, animals, the garden, and the sky) instead.”
“Young men are supposed to think themselves immortal, but the subject is not very often out of my mind for a long time together.”
“The doctrines of Christianity, or the many different theologies, are less true than the true myth because they are only attempts to translate the story, while God has expressed it all more adequately in the real incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection.”
“So many things have now become interesting to me because at first I had to do them whether I liked them or not, and thus one is kicked into conquering new countries where one is afterwards at home.”
“In his letter of 23 October 1928 Warnie wrote of a sea voyage to Hong Kong. ‘The most interesting person on board,’ he said, ‘was the Chief Engineer who was a character straight out of Kipling–such a man as I had always believed never existed outside novels…I first came across him one night after dinner when a few of us collected in the saloon for a mouthful of the port, and McAndrew’s Hymn being mentioned, he expressed his warmest approval of it…This and some more chat led to an invitation to adjourn to his room and inspect “ma buiks”. It was a severe shock after a discussion on Kipling to arrive at his room and come bolt under a withering collection of philosophy–Spencer, Comte, and similar books. I had to mumble something about having no philosophy, which was met with “When ye say ye haaaave no pheelawsophy, Cap’n, ye only mean ye haaave a bad pheelawsophy.”
“Are you often struck, when you become sufficiently intimate with other people to know something of their development, how late their lives begin so to speak? I mean these men you meet who seem to have read everything, done everything, and yet they were pure barbarians until they left school, and had turned twenty perhaps before they began to be interested in the things that interest them now?”
“Ideally, Screwtape's advice to Wormwood should have been balanced by archangelical advice to the patient's guardian angel. Without this the picture of human life is lopsided. But who could supply the deficiency? Even if a man—and he would have to be a far better man than I—could scale the spiritual heights required, what answerable style could he use? For the style would really be part of the content. Mere advice would be no good; every sentence would have to smell of Heaven. And nowadays even if you could write pros like Johanna's, you wouldn't be allowed to for the canon of functionalism has disabled literature for half its functions. At bottom, every idealist style dictates not only how we should say things, but what sort of things we may say.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
topics: c-s-lewis , dictators , freedom-of-speech , idealism , idealist , screwtape , some-everyday-thoughts , wormwood
“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next. The Apostles themselves, who set on foot the conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the Slave Trade, all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Christian Behaviour
“At bottom, every idealist style dictates not only how we should say things, but what sort of things we may say.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
topics: some-everyday-thoughts
“The modern State exists not to protect our rights but to do us good or make us good — anyway, to do something to us or to make us something. Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their subjects than their wards, pupils, or domestic animals. There is nothing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own business.’ Our whole lives are their business.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has ‘the freeborn mind’. But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of Government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“Hell is a state of mind—ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind—is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly. For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains.’ ‘But”
“We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about.”
“At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s real resistance to the loss of our faith?”
“Listen!’ said the White Spirit. ‘Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.’ ‘Ah,”
“Dios no murió por el hombre porque hubiera percibido algo valioso en él. Cada espíritu en si mismo, sin considerar su relación con Él, carece en absoluto de valor”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from C.S. Lewis on Faith
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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.