C.S. Lewis Biography | Inspiration Quotations | Motivation Quotes

C.S. Lewis Motivational Quotations:

• “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

•  “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

• “You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.”

•  “Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.”

• “The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”

•  “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.”

•  “Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

•  “Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.”

•  “We are what we believe we are.”

•  “Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

•  “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.”

•  “Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

•  “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.”

•  “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

•  “Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.”

•  “A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”

•  “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

•  “Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.”

•  “Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.”

•  “Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.”

•  “History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.”

•  “Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave with regret? There are better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

•  “Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.”

•  “I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”

•  “Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.”

•  “Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest.”

•  “Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.”

•  “Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.”

•  “Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.”

•  “When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in theworld.”

  

   

• “An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.”

•  “Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.”

•  “Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.”

•  “I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.”

•  “The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

•  “There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.”

•  “Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.”

•  “What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.”

•  “The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

•  “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”

•  “I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.”

•  “I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.”

•  “Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult.”

•  “Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.”

•  “It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.”

•  “How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.”

•  “Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.”

•  “Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.”

• “Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.”