C. S. Lewis Inspirational Quotations

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

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even 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. To love is to be vulnerable.

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

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

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.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

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.

With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.

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

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

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.

We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.

Joy is the serious business of heaven.

God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst.

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.

Readers are advised to remember the devil is a liar.

Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.

Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.

No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.

Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.

When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.

Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.

You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God.

The moment you wake up each morning, all your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists in shoving it all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other, larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.

The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred

It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.

All get what they want; they do not always like it.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.

I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ.

Jesus Christ did not say, 'Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.'

The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.

What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.

All their life in this world and all their adventures had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.

The people with very hard problems are understood by God. He knows what wretched machines they are trying to drive. Some day he will fling them away and give those people new ones; then they may astonish everyone, for they learned their driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last.

There is something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefor, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

How little people know who think that holiness is dull... When one meets the real thing, it's irresistible!

The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper.

This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.

To walk out of his will is to walk into nowhere.

All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.

Both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporary suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me but have this and I'll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.

The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.

What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you...We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.

The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.

The action of Pity leaps quicker than light from the highest place to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the cunning tears of Hell, impose on good the tyranny of evil. Every disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue yellow to please those who insist on having jaundice, nor make a midden of the world's garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell of roses.

All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world; but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.

The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.

Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.

A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered.