Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“My son, my son,” said Aslan. “I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another. But”

“During one walk, Jack engaged in the first metaphysical argument that he can remember. It concerned the nature of the future: Is it like a line that you can’t see or a line that is not yet drawn? He would delight in such arguments for the rest of his life.”

“Doch diejenigen, die mich auffordern, an diesem Weltbild [Evolutionstheorie] zu glauben, wollen mich auch glauben machen, dass die Vernunft lediglich ein unvorhergesehenes und unbeabsichtigtes Nebenprodukt unbelebter Materie in einem Stadium ihrer endlosen und ziellosen Bewegung ist. Ist das nicht ein glatter Widerspruch?”

“But all civilisations pass away and, even while they remain, inflict peculiar sufferings of their own probably sufficient to outweigh what alleviations they may have brought to the normal pains of man.”

“I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ. And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Thus the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. Let Him but sheathe that sword for a moment and I behave like a puppy when the hated bath is over—I shake myself as dry as I can and race off to reacquire my comfortable dirtiness, if not in the nearest manure heap, at least in the nearest flower bed. And that is why tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.”

“it may be quite sensible for a mother to say to the children, "i'm not going to go and make you tidy the schoolroom every night. You've got to learn to keep it tidy on your own." Then she goes up one night and finds the teddy bear and the ink and the French Grammar all lying in the grate. That is against her will. She would prefer the children to be tidy. But on the other hand, it is her will which has left the children free to be untidy. The same thing arises in any regiment, or trade union, or school. You make a thing voluntary and then half the people do not do it. That is not what you willed, but your will has made it possible. it is probably the same in the universe. God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right.”

“Pero en cuanto empiezo a intentar explicar cómo están relacionadas esas tres Personas de la Trinidad tengo que utilizar palabras que hacen que parezca que una de ellas ha estado allí antes de las demás. La Primera Persona se llama el Padre y la Segunda el Hijo. Decimos que la primera engendra la segunda: lo llamamos engendrar y no crear, porque lo que la primera Persona produce es de la misma clase que Ella. En ese aspecto la palabra Padre es la única que podemos utilizar. Pero desgraciadamente ésta sugiere que Ella estuvo ahí primero, del mismo modo que un padre humano existe antes que su hijo. Pero esto no es así. Aquí no hay un antes y un después. Y por eso he dedicado algún tiempo al intento de aclarar cómo una cosa puede ser la fuente, o la causa, o el origen de otra sin haber estado allí antes. El Hijo es porque el Padre es, pero nunca hubo un momento en que el Padre produjera al Hijo. El Hijo es porque el Padre es, pero nunca hubo un momento en que el Padre produjera al Hijo.”

“Now the whole offer which Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God.”

“When He said, ‘Be perfect,’ He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder—in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.”

“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. -Book 2, chapter 1”

“The truth is we believe in decency so much--we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so--that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility. For you notice that it is only for our bad behavior that we find all these explanations.”

“As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, [he will not repent] of a definite, fully recognized, sin, ... only [vaguely and uneasily] feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately... If such a feeling is allowed to live... it increases reluctance to think about [God]. All humans at nearly all times have some such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold. They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a bankbook. In this state... {man] will increasingly dislike his religious duties. He will think about them as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as possible when they are over. He will want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective contact with [his Heavenly Father]... Uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real happiness...”

“Una religión moderada es tan buena para nosotros como la falta absoluta de religión —y más divertida. Mantén su mente lejos de la simple antítesis entre lo Verdadero y lo Falso. Bonitas expresiones difusas —“Fue una fase”, “Ya he superado todo eso”—, y no olvides la bendita palabra “Adolescente”.”

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go either wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata—of creatures that worked like machines—would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk. Perhaps we feel inclined to disagree with Him. But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source. When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will—that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings—then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“When He talks of their losing their selves, He only mean abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, while He is delighted to see them sacrificing even their innocent wills to His, He hates to see them drifting away from their own nature for any other reason.”

“...in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.”

“People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed." The”

“A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted: but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge”

“En todas las experiencias que pueden hacerles mejores o más felices sólo los hechos físicos son “reales”, mientras que los elementos espirituales son “subjetivos”; en todas las experiencias que pueden desanimarles o corromperles, los elementos espirituales son la realidad fundamental, e ignorarlos es ser un escapista. Tu paciente, adecuadamente manipulado, no tendrá ninguna dificultad en considerar su emoción ante el espectáculo de unas entrañas humanas como una revelación de la realidad y su emoción ante la visión de unos niños felices o de un día radiante como mero sentimiento.”

“El odio es a menudo la compensación mediante la que un hombre asustado se resarce de los sufrimientos del miedo. Cuanto más miedo tenga, más odiará. Y el odio es también un antídoto de la vergüenza. Por tanto, para hacer una herida profunda en su caridad, primero debes vencer su valor.”