Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“I can’t understand this. There is not a breath of wind. The sail hangs dead. The sea is as flat as a pond. And yet we drive on as fast as if there were a gale behind us.” “I’ve been thinking that, too,” said Caspian. “We must be caught in some strong current.” “H’m,” said Edmund. “That’s not so nice if the World really has an edge and we’re getting near it.” “You mean,” said Caspian, “that we might be just--well, poured over it?” “Yes, yes,” cried Reepicheep, clapping his paws together. “That’s how I’ve always imagined it--the World like a great round table and the waters of all the oceans endlessly pouring over the edge. The ship will tip up--stand on her head--for one moment we shall see over the edge--and then, down, down, the rush, the speed--” “And what do you think will be waiting for us at the bottom, eh?” said Drinian. “Aslan’s country, perhaps,” said the Mouse, its eyes shining. “Or perhaps there isn’t any bottom. Perhaps it goes down for ever and ever. But whatever it is, won’t it be worth anything just to have looked for one moment beyond the edge of the world.” “But look here,” said Eustace, “this is all rot. The world’s round--I mean, round like a ball, not like a table.” “ world is,” said Edmund. “But is this?” “Do you mean to say,” asked Caspian, “that you three come from a round world (round like a ball) and you’ve never told me! It’s really too bad of you. Because we have fairy-tales in which there are round worlds and I always loved them. I never believed there were any real ones. But I’ve always wished there were and I’ve always longed to live in one. Oh, I’d give anything--I wonder why you can get into our world and we never get into yours? If only I had the chance! It must be exciting to live on a thing like a ball. Have you ever been to the parts where people walk about upside-down?” Edmund shook his head. “And it isn’t like that,” he added. “There’s nothing particularly exciting about a round world when you’re there.”

“For in grief nothing stays put. One keeps emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats.”

“In a game of chess you can make certain arbitrary concessions to your opponent, which stand to the ordinary rules of the game as miracles stand to the laws of nature. You can deprive yourself of a castle, or allow the other man sometimes to take back a move made inadvertently. But if you conceded everything that at any moment happened to suit him — if all his moves were revocable and if all your pieces disappeared whenever their position on the board was not to his liking — then you could not have a game at all. So it is with the life of souls in a world: fixed laws, consequences unfolding by causal necessity, the whole natural order, are at once limits within which their common life is confined and also the sole condition under which any such life is possible. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.”

“It did,” said Aslan. “Do you think I wouldn’t obey my own rules?”

“the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress.”

“But oh God, tenderly, tenderly. Already, month by month and week by week you broke her body on the wheel whilst she still wore it. Is it not yet enough?”

“For at that very moment, whether because the Sea Serpent was being pushed so hard, or because it foolishly decided to draw the noose tight, the whole of the carved stern broke off and the ship was free. The others were too exhausted to see what Lucy saw. There, a few yards behind them, the loop of Sea Serpent’s body got rapidly smaller and disappeared into a splash. Lucy always said (but of course she was very excited at the moment, and it may have been only imagination) that she saw a look of idiotic satisfaction on the creature’s face. What is certain is that it was a very stupid animal, for instead of pursuing the ship it turned its head round and began nosing all along its own body as if it expected to find the wreckage of the there. But the was already well away, running before a fresh breeze, and the men lay and sat panting and groaning all about the deck, till presently they were able to talk about it, and then to laugh about it. And when some rum had been served out they even raised a cheer; and everyone praised the valor or Eustace (though it hadn’t done any good) and of Reepicheep.”

“عندما يكون لدى الشخص الذي يوقع الألم سلطة معينة للقيام بذلك .. و يحوّل هذه السلطة إلى إمتياز عام لإيلام البشرية لأن الألم أمر جيد بالنسبة لهم .. فهذا في الحقيقة ليس تدمير المخطط الإلهي بل تطوع لمركز إبليس داخل هذا المخطط. لأنك إذا قمت بعمل إبليس، فلابد أن تكون مستعداً لأجرة إبليس و جزاءه”

“This demand is valuable in various ways. In the first place it diminishes pleasure while increasing desire. The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the law of diminishing returns. And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both. And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Enemy forbids. Thus”

“The Stylemonger’s criteria, though for a different reason, are as wide of the mark as those of the law, and in the same way. If the mass of the people are unliterary, he is antiliterary. He creates in the minds of the unliterary (who have often suffered under him at school) a hatred of the very word style and a profound distrust of every book that is said to be well written. And if style meant what the Stylemonger values, this hatred and distrust would be right. The”

“In our age I think it would be fair to say that the ease with which a scientific theory assumes the dignity and rigidity of fact varies inversely with the individual's scientific education. In discussion with wholly uneducated audiences I have sometimes found matter which real scientists would regard as highly speculative more firmly believed than many things within our real knowledge; the popular imago of the Cave Man ranked as hard fact, and the life of Caesar or Napoleon as doubtful rumor. ... The mass media which have in our time created a popular scientism, a caricature of the true sciences, did not then exist [in the middle ages]. The ignorant were more aware of their ignorance then than now.”

“A mí me resulta difícil pensar en la idea del Padre engendrando muchos hijos para toda la eternidad. Para ser muchos tendrían que ser diferentes unos de otros. Dos peniques tienen la misma forma. ¿De qué manera son dos? Ocupando lugares diferentes y conteniendo diferentes átomos. En otras palabras, para pensar en ellos como diferentes entre sí hemos tenido que introducir la idea del espacio y la materia; es decir, hemos tenido que introducir la idea de la «naturaleza» o el universo creado.”

“If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.”

“Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently ‘Love your neighbour’ does not mean ‘feel fond of him’ or ‘find him attractive’.”

“The horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the human heart—an endless source of heresies in religion, folly in counsel, infidelity in marriage, and inconstancy in friendship. The humans live in time, and experience reality successively. To experience much of it, therefore, they must experience many different things; in other words, they must experience change. And since they need change, the Enemy (being a hedonist at heart) has made change pleasurable to them, just as He has made eating pleasurable. But since He does not wish them to make change, any more than eating, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in them by a love of permanence. He has contrived to gratify both tastes together on the very world He has made, by that union of change and permanence which we call rhythm. He gives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the same, so that spring is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an immemorial theme. He gives them in His Church a spiritual ear; they change from a fast to a feast, but it is the same feast as before.”

“The tension of human nerves during noise, danger, and fatigue, makes them prone to any violent emotion”

“3. When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother’s eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy—if you know”

“...if ever consciously directs his prayers "Not to what I think thou art but to what thou knowest thyself to be", our situation is, for the moment, desperate.”

“Mi querido Orugario: A veces me pregunto si te crees que has sido enviado al mundo para tu propia diversión.”

“Una vez que consigas hacerle pensar que “la religión está muy bien, pero hasta cierto punto”, podrás sentirte satisfecho acerca de su alma. Una religión moderada es tan buena para nosotros como la falta absoluta de religión —y más divertida. Otra”