Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis
“The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly.”
“We all want progress, but if you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.”
“Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes but when you look back everything is different.”
topics: life
“So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man...”
“To know what would have happened, child?" said Aslan. "No. Nobody is ever told that.”
“Those who tread 'adult' as a term of approval cannot hope to be considered adult themselves. When I became a man I put away childish things, along with the desire to be very grown up.”
“His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future—haunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth—ready to break the Enemy’s commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other—dependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow’s end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.”
“Puddleglum!" said Jill. "You're a regular old humbug. You sound as doleful as a funeral and I believe you're perfectly happy. And you talk as if you were afraid of everything, when you're really as brave as - as a lion.”
“You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!”
“The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should incipient allegories to the reader. [C.S. Lewis writes to J.R.R. Tolkien on December 7, 1929]”
“Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never really was any problem.”
“There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle over the gas ring.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Perelandra
topics: hell
“We are arguing like a man who should say, if there were an invisible cat in that empty chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it.”
“Did Maleldil suggest that our own world might have been saved if the elephant had accidentally trodden on the serpent a moment before Eve was about to yield?”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Perelandra
“He is indeed but breathing dust and a careless touch would unmake him. And in his best thoughts there are such things mingled as, if we thought them, our light would perish. But he is in the body of Maleldil and his sins are forgiven.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
from Perelandra
“He was only too well aware that such resolutions might look very different when the moment came, but he felt an unwonted assurance that somehow or other he would be able to go through with it. It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible.”
― C.S. Lewis ,
Group of Brands
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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.