Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis
“One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up.”
“Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.”
“The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers "I've read it already" to be a conclusive argument against reading a work...Those read great works,on the other hand will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of there life.”
“Come in by the gold gates or not at all, Take of my fruit for others or forbear, For those who steal or those who climb my wall Shall find their heart’s desire and find despair.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“Often, when I pray, I wonder if I'm not posting letters to a non-existent address.”
“At my father's club, sitting before the fire, we had spoken of 'moments made eternity', meaning what are called timeless moments, moments precisely without the pressure of time--moments that might be called, indeed, moments. And we had clearly understood that the pressure of time was our nearly inescapable awareness of an approaching terminus-the bell about to ring, the holiday about to end, the going down from Oxford foreseen...Life itself is pressured by death, the final terminus. Socrates refused to delay his own death for a few more hours: perhaps he knew that those few hours under the pressure of time would be worth little....Awareness of duration, of terminus, spoils .”
“To shrink back from all that can be called Nature into negative spirituality is as if we ran away from horses instead of learning to ride. There is in our present pilgrim condition plenty of room (more room than most of us like) for abstinence and renunciation and mortifying our natural desires. But behind all asceticism the thought should be, ‘Who will trust us with the true wealth if we cannot be trusted even with the wealth that perishes?’ Who will trust me with a spiritual body if I cannot control even an earthly body? These small and perishable bodies we now have were given to us as ponies are given to schoolboys. We must learn to manage: not that we may some day be free of horses altogether but that some day we may ride bare-back, confident and rejoicing, those greater mounts, those winged, shining and world- shaking horses which perhaps even now expect us with impatience, pawing and snorting in the King’s stables. Not that the gallop would be of any value unless it were a gallop with the King; but how else— since He has retained His own charger—should we accompany Him?”
“If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.”
“After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give.”
“And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”
“And when they looked at her they thought that they had never before known what beauty meant.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“And suddenly there came a breeze from the east, tossing the top of the wave into foamy shapes and ruffling the smooth water all round them. It lasted only a second or so but what it brought them in that second none of those three children will ever forget. It brought both a smell and a sound, a musical sound. Edmund and Eustace would never talk about it afterwareds. Lucy could only say, "It would break your heart." "Why," said I, "was it so sad?" "Sad!! No," said Lucy.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us;”
“It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.”
“In the end the number of things he thought of saying all at once nearly suffocated him and he became silent.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“Then the lion said – but I don't know if it spoke – You will have to let me undress you. I was afraid of his claws, I can tell you, but I was pretty nearly desperate now. So I just lay flat down on my back to let him do it. "The very first tear he made was so deep and I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt. The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off. You know – if you've ever picked the scab of a sore place. It hurts like billy-oh but it is such fun to see it coming away.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Great Divorce
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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.