Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody [behind the Moral Law]. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.”

“Dios puede mostrarse a Sí mismo tal como es realmente sólo a hombres reales. Y eso significa no sólo a hombres que son individualmente buenos, sino a hombres que están unidos juntos en un cuerpo, amándose unos a otros, ayudándose unos a otros, enseñándose a Dios unos a otros. Puesto que eso es la que Dios quería que fuese la Humanidad: como músicos de una única orquesta, u órganos de un único cuerpo. En consecuencia, el único instrumento adecuado para aprender acerca de Dios es toda la comunidad cristiana, esperándole juntos. La hermandad cristiana es, por así decirlo, el equipo técnico para esta ciencia: el equipo de laboratorio.”

“Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.”

“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of ‘Heaven’ ridiculous by saying they do not want ‘to spend eternity playing harps’. The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.”

“He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

“They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent connections, and the policy of safety first. So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or ‘science’ or psychology, or what not.”

“You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of humility. Let him think of it not as self-forgetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a little opinion) of his own talents and character.”

“Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves.5 Keep them watching their own minds6 and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills.”

“All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.”

“they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.”

“Por mucho que se mejore el material en bruto de un hombre, aún tenemos algo más: la auténtica y libre elección de ese hombre, basada en el material que se le facilita, de anteponer su propio beneficio o relegarlo a un último lugar. Y esta libre elección es lo único que le concierne a la moral. El material psicológico malo no es un pecado sino una enfermedad. No necesita del arrepentimiento sino de la curación. Y por cierto, esto es muy importante. Los seres humanos se juzgan unos a otros por sus actos externos. Dios los juzga por sus elecciones morales.”

“He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. ~C.S. Lewis~”

“Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? I think it is, if nothing else, too anthropomorphic. When you come to think of it, it is far more anthropomorphic than picturing Him as a grave old king with a long beard. That image is a Jungian archetype. It links God with all the wise old kings in the fairy-tales, with prophets, sages, magicians. Though it is (formally) the picture of a man, it suggests something more than humanity. At the very least it gets in the idea of something older than yourself, something that knows more, something you can't fathom. It preserves mystery. Therefore room for hope. Therefore room for a dread or awe that needn't be mere fear of mischief from a spiteful potentate. But the picture I was building up last night is simply the picture of a man like S.C. - who used to sit next to me at dinner and tell me what he'd been doing to the cats that afternoon. Now a being like S.C., however magnified, couldn't invent or create or govern anything. He would set traps and try to bait them. But he'd never have thought of baits like love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset. He make a universe? He couldn't make a joke, or a bow, or an apology, or a friend.”

“For the story which gives us the experience most like the experiences of living is not necessarily the story whose events are most like those in a biography or a newspaper.”

“In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.”

“No doubt he must very soon realize that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends is based. I don't think that matters much provided that you can persuade him to postpone any open acknowledge of the fact, and this, with the aid of shame, pride, modesty and vanity, will be easy to do. As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent.”

“Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. But”

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

“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.”

“Thank God that there are solid folk Who water flowers and roll the lawn, And sit an sew and talk and smoke, And snore all through the summer dawn. Who pass untroubled nights and days Full-fed and sleepily content, Rejoicing in each other's praise, Respectable and innocent.”