Skip links

Inspirational Quotations

by RightAttitudes.com

Inspirational Quotations 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 the First World War, 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 extensive 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 (via CC-BY-SA license) • READ: Works by C. S. Lewis

When the voice of your friend or the page of your book sinks into democratic equality with the pattern of the wallpaper, the feel of your clothes, your memory of last night, and the noises from the road, you are falling asleep. The highly selective consciousness enjoyed by fully alert men, with all its builded sentiments and consecrated ideals, has as much to be called real as the drowsy chaos, and more.
—C. S. Lewis

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

We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely.
—C. S. Lewis

Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
—C. S. Lewis

You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, said Aslan. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
—C. S. Lewis

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

What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what sort of person you are.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Character, Perception

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

We must lay before him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Prayer

The decay of logic results from an untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
—C. S. Lewis

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.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Miracles

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Pride

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

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

Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn.
—C. S. Lewis

What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.
—C. S. Lewis

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Thinking

You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
—C. S. Lewis

I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now…Come further up, come further in.
—C. S. Lewis

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.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Reality, Books, Literature

If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a “wandering to find home,” why should we not look forward to the arrival?
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Death, Dying, Nature

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

What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Experience

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.
—C. S. Lewis

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God- it changes me.
—C. S. Lewis

Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men’s belief that they “own” their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
—C. S. Lewis
Topics: Home

Related Authors