Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.”

“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.”

“It is far better to make them live in the Future. Biological necessity makes all their passions point in that direction already, so that thought about the Future inflames hope and fear. Also, it is unknown to them, so that in making them think about it we make them think of unrealities. In a word, the Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time—for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future. Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

“And we said we loved her.” “And we did. She had no more dangerous enemies than us.” - Queen Orual and The Fox”

“It was a rich place: as rich as plumcake.”

“They shouted, “Eustace! Eustace! Coo-ee!” till they were hoarse and Caspian blew his horn. “He’s nowhere near or he’d have heard that,” said Lucy with a white face. “Confound the fellow,” said Edmund. “What on earth did he want to slink away like this for?” “But we must do something,” said Lucy. “He may have got lost, or fallen into a hole, or been captured by savages.” “Or killed by wild beasts,” said Drinian. “And a good riddance if he has, say,” muttered Rhince. “Master Rhince,” said Reepicheep, “you never spoke a word that became you less. The creature is no friend of mine but he is of the Queen’s blood, and while he is one of our fellowship it concerns our honor to find him and to avenge him if he is dead.” “Of course we’ve got to find him (if we ),” said Caspian wearily. “That’s the nuisance of it. It means a search party and endless trouble. Bother Eustace.”

“But inside of the tree itself, in the very sap of it, the tree never forgot that other tree in Narnia to which it belonged. Sometimes it would move mysteriously when there was no wind blowing.”

“I am a star at rest, my daughter,” answered Ramandu. “When I set for the last time, decrepit and old beyond all that you can reckon, I was carried to this island. I am not so old now as I was then. Every morning a bird brings me a fire-berry from the valleys in the Sun, and each fire-berry takes away a little of my age. And when I have become as young as the child that was born yesterday, then I shall take my rising again (for we are at earth’s eastern rim) and once more tread the great dance.” “In our world,” said Eustace, “a star is a huge ball of flaming gas.” “Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of. And in”

“The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self—all your wishes and precautions—to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead.”

“Badgers!” said Lucy. “Foxes!” said Edmund. “Rabbits!” said Susan.”

“of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house.”

“THE PLANTING OF THE TREE”

“He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to 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 cannot 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 shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people ‘good’ by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be ‘priggish’, ‘intolerant’, and (of course) ‘Puritanical’. Meanwhile”

“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.”

“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...”

“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.»”

“I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong.”

“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.”

“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.”

“You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own.”