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Inspirational Quotations

by RightAttitudes.com

Inspirational Quotes by C. S. Lewis (Irish-born Author, Scholar)

Inspirational Quotations by C. S. Lewis (Irish-born Author, Scholar)

Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was a British academic, novelist, broadcaster, religious writer, literary scholar, and children’s writer.

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Lewis was the son of a solicitor. He was wounded in World War I, attended Oxford’s University College as a classicist, but made his career in English literature. Though a theological layman, Lewis became widely known as one of the most important Christian apologetics writers of the 20th century. His books The Problem of Pain (1940,) Miracles (1947,) and The Four Loves (1960) were highly influential. Lewis’s great reputation was largely due to his popular radio talks on religious themes, collected in Mere Christianity (1952.)

He held academic positions at both Oxford University and Cambridge University. He created the imaginary land of ‘Narnia’ for a series of seven fantasy stories, which began with the heavily allegorical and highly successful The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1950.)

More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by C. S. Lewis

This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
—C. S. Lewis

The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Knowledge

The rule for us all is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; 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.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Friendship

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
—C. S. Lewis

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Honor

The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Value

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Love, Heart

Make the choice adventurous stranger, strike the bell and bide the danger or wonder ’till it drives you mad what would have happened if you had.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Risk

If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Desires, Explanation

If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Heaven

Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pleasure

As for wrinkles—Pshaw! Why shouldn’t we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Age

If, as I can’t help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Grief, Bereavement, Grieving

It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It’s not the sort of comfort they supply there.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer

Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Money, Misery

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Time, Resilience, Patience, Future, The Future, Time Management, Tomorrow

It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: The Bible

An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Explanation, One liners

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
—C. S. Lewis

Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness? While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion

We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: God

I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Giving, Charity

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is…. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Self-Control

The longest way round is the shortest way home.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Haste

Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason once accepted, despite your changing moods.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Belief, Faith

It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Miracles

I like bats much better than bureaucrats. I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of Admin. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid dens of crime that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Evil

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Religion, Questions, God

But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Age

The value of the myth is that it takes all the things we know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
—C. S. Lewis

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