Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“Laziness means more work in the long run.”

“It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned. As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness. Of course it is not pure charity; it involves love of our neighbours in the local, not of our Neighbour, in the Dominical, sense. But those who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving ‘Man’ whom they have not. All natural affections, including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children.”

“You have forgotten to clean your sword,” said Aslan. It was true. Peter blushed when he looked at the bright blade and saw it all smeared with the Wolf’s hair and blood. He stooped down and wiped it quite clean on the grass, and then wiped it quite dry on his coat. “Hand it to me and kneel, Son of Adam,” said Aslan. And when Peter had done so he struck him with the flat of the blade and said, “Rise up, Sir Peter Wolf’s-Bane. And, whatever happens, never forget to wipe your sword.”

“For a second after Askan had breathed upon him the stone lion looked just the same. Then a tiny streak of gold began to run all over him as the flame licks all over a bit of paper- then, while his hindquaters were still obviously stone, the lion shook his mane and all the heavy, stone folds rippled into living hair.”

“If we cannot 'practice the presence of God', it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like men who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches out his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to be no longer perfectly asleep.”

“Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make day to day are of such great importance.”

“But a Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.”

“the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. Does”

“Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile?”

“If you are interested enough to have read thus far you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord’s Prayer. Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realise what the words mean, you realise that you are not a son of God. You are not a being like The Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father: you are a bundle of self-centred fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. So that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it. Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretence is there instead of the real thing; as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretence leads up to the real thing.”

“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.”

“You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them?”

“حاول أن تستبعد إمكانية الألم المتضمن في نظام الطبيعة و وجود الإرادات الحرة، و ستجد أنك تستبعد الحياة نفسها”

“I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too.”

“الناس الذين لا يعنينا شيء من أمرهم هم الذين نطلب لهم السعادة بأية شروط، أما أصدقائنا، و أحبائنا، و أبنائنا، فإننا نكون صارمين، و نفضّل حتى أن نراهم يتألمون كثيراً عن أن يكونوا سعداء بطريقة حقيرة و جافية”

“Don’t you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they cannot help? -Psyche”

“But the most part seemed to think that the mere fact of having contrived for themselves so much misery gave them a kind of superiority. ‘You have led a sheltered life!’ they bawled. ‘You don’t know the seamy side. We’ll tell you. We’ll give you some hard facts’—as if to tinge Heaven with infernal images and colours had been the only purpose for which they came. All alike, so far as I could judge from my own exploration of the lower world, were wholly unreliable, and all equally incurious about the country in which they had arrived. They repelled every attempt to teach them, and when they found that nobody listened to them they went back, one by one, to the bus. This curious wish to describe Hell turned out, however, to be only the mildest form of a desire very common among the Ghosts—the desire to extend Hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven.”

“a radiant and infectious, almost childlike gaiety which was always bubbling over into delighted and delightful laughter.”

“قال توما الإكويني عن الألم، مثلما قال أرسطو قبله عن الشعور بالخزي، أنه ليس شيئاً جيداً في حد ذاته، بل شيئاً قد يكون له خير معين في ظروف معينة. هذا يعني أنه إذا كان الشر موجوداً، فإن الألم في إدراكه للشر، حيث أن هذا نوع من المعرفة، هو خير نسبياً؛ لأن البديل هو أن تكون النفس جاهلة بالشر، أو جاهلة بأن الشر مناقض لطبيعتها، و كما يقول الفيلسوف، "أي منهما سيء بشكل واضح". و أنا أعتقد، أننا رغم أننا نقشعر من ذلك، إلا أننا نتفق معه.”

“Of the things that followed I cannot say at all whether they were what men call dream. And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.”