Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis
“ONCE THERE WERE FOUR CHILDREN whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to”
“Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. But man’s love for God, from the very nature of the case, must always be very largely, and must often be entirely, a Need-love. This is obvious when we implore forgiveness for our sins or support in our tribulations. But in the long run it is perhaps even more apparent in our growing—for it ought to be growing—awareness that our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“We’re following a guide we know nothing about. How do we know which side that bird is on? Why shouldn’t it be leading us into a trap?” “That’s a nasty idea. Still--a robin, you know. They’re good birds in all the stories I’ve ever read. I’m sure a robin wouldn’t be on the wrong side.” “If it comes to that, which the right side? How do we know that the fauns are in the right and the Queen (yes, I know we’ve been she’s a witch) is in the wrong? We don’t really know anything about either.” “The Faun saved Lucy.” “He he did, But how do we know? And there’s another thing too. Has anyone the least idea of the way home from here?” “Great Scott!” said Peter. “I hadn’t thought of that.” “And no chance of dinner, either,” said Edmund.”
“We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“What I have called Appreciative love is no basic element in Affection. It usually needs absence or bereavement to set us praising those to whom only Affection binds us. We take them for granted: and this taking for granted, which is an outrage in erotic love, is here right and proper up to a point. It fits the comfortable, quiet nature of the feeling. Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“a radiant and infectious, almost childlike gaiety which was always bubbling over into delighted and delightful laughter.”
“There was a nice brown egg, lightly boiled, for each of them, and then sardines on toast, and then buttered toast, and then toast with honey, and then a sugar-topped cake. And when Lucy was tired of eating, the Faun began to talk. He had wonderful tales to tell of life in the forest. He told about the midnight dances and how the Nymphs who lived in the wells and the Dryads who lived in the trees came out to dance with the Fauns; about long hunting parties after the milk-white stag who could give you wishes if you caught him; about feasting and treasure-seeking with the wild Red Dwarfs in deep mines and caverns far beneath the forest floor; and then about summer when the woods were green and old Silenus on his fat donkey would come to visit them, and sometimes Bacchus himself, and then the streams would run with wine instead of water and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.”
“Just as there are none good but God, and nothing good but goodness, so there are no loves but love its self, the very love; and that what I call the other unnatural loves, are not loves at all in their own right but become so only so far as they participate in the very love.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“The loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves and do what they promise to do without God's help.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it.”
“But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.”
“Not that we must always partake of [God's feast] solemnly. "God who made good laughter" forbid. It is one of the difficult and delightful subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly as a game.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops.”
“De todos los argumentos contra el amor, ninguno atrae tanto a mi naturaleza como «¡ Cuidado!, eso te puede hacer sufrir». A mi naturaleza, a mi temperamento, sí; pero no a mi conciencia. Cuando me dejo llevar por esa atracción me doy cuenta de que estoy a mil millas de Cristo.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
“enchanted Turkish Delight and that anyone who had once tasted it would want more and more of it, and would even, if they were allowed, go on eating it till they killed themselves.”
“A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from The Four Loves
“I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But”
“Después de cada fracaso, pedid perdón, levantaos del suelo y volved a intentarlo. Muy a menudo, lo que Dios nos otorga primero no es la virtud en sí sino este poder de volver a intentarlo de nuevo.”
“Last night I dreamed that I was come again Unto the house where my beloved dwells After long years of wandering and pain. And I stood out beneath the drenching rain And all the street was bare, and black with night, But in my true love's house was warmth and light. Yet I could not draw near nor enter in, And long I wondered if some secret sin Or old, unhappy anger held me fast; Till suddenly it came into my head That I was killed long since and lying dead— Only a homeless wraith that way had passed.”
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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.