Inspirational Quotes by C.S. Lewis

“Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. ... [Therefore, even though] learning makes a free commerce between the ages... every generation [is cut] off from all others... [and] ...characteristic errors of one [are not] corrected by the characteristic truths of another.”

“On fine nights when the cold and the drumtaps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak.”

“She felt frightened only for a second. For one thing, the world beneath her was so very far away that it seemed to have nothing to do with her.”

“a creature who has kept a planet in its orbit for several billions of years will be able to manage a packing case!”

“On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.”

“What do we really know of other people's souls. Of their struggles, dreams, or tempations. For there is only one soul who we truly do know and thats the ones who's destiny is placed on our own hands”

“It is not fore nothing that you are named Ransom.”

“There was a time in childhood when I didn't yet know I was ugly. Then there was a time when I believed as girls do— and as Batta was always telling m— that I could make it more tolerable by this or that done to my clothes or my hair. Now, I chose to be veiled.”

“I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets.”

“He had not yet learned that sometimes your reward for doing one task well is to be set with a harder and better one.”

“Strengthen the feebler, lighten the darker, love all.”

“But I want her, I must have her, I shall die if I do not get her - false, proud, black-hearted daughter of a dog that she is! I cannot sleep and my food has no savor and my eyes are darkened because of her beauty. I must have the barbarian queen.”

“I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it til now.”

“It's all in Plato, all in Plato: Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools? - Digory Kirke”

“This world is bursting with life for these few days because the song with which I called it into life still hangs in the air and rumbles in the ground. It will not be so for long. But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. If I spoke to him, he would hear only growlings and roarings. Oh Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! But I will give him the only gift he is still able to receive.”

“That was what it felt like - as if one had always been in that place and never been bored although nothing had ever happened.”

“beneath the fragile and very human veneer of the organized churches of the world, there lies a truth so real and so pristine that all of man’s concocted philosophical posings tumble into ruin beside it.”

“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. And the higher and mightier it is in the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels.”

“But then of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all. That's what was really wrong with all those popular pictures of happy reunions 'on the further shore'; not the simple-minded and very earthly images, but the fact that they make an End of what we can get only as a by-product of the true End. Lord, are these your real terms? Can I meet H. again only if I learn to love you so much that I don't care whether I meet her or not?”

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”