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C.S. Lewis Quotes – For literary lovers, you must be familiar with the figure of C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis or Clive Staples Lewis was a British writer and literary scholar, born into a Protestant family in Belfast, although most of his life was spent in England.
Lewis is known for his work in medieval literature and for his Christian apologetics and fiction, particularly his book series The Chronicles of Narnia.
As a child, Lewis was fond of “clothed animals.” He fell in love with Beatrix Potter’s stories and often wrote animal stories and illustrated them.
He and his older brother, Warnie, together created the world of Boxen, which is inhabited and managed by animals.
Lewis loved to read, and because his father’s house was full of books, he felt that finding one he had not read was as easy as finding a blade of grass. In his childhood, he was also very afraid of spiders, and insects, so the animals often appeared in his dreams.
As a teenager, he was fascinated by Richard Wagner and the songs and legends of the Land of the North.
All of this reinforced a longing within him, a deep desire which he later called “joy.” That is, the beginning of his interest in many literatures in the world.
Many things we can learn from the figure of C.S. Lewis, from his literary works to other inspirations that came from the figure of C.S. Lewis the legend.
For that, here are 150 C.S. Lewis quotes about inspiration and life motivation from a legendary writer.
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C.S. Lewis Quotes Which About Life Give Us Inspires
1. “Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest.”
2. “In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, ‘Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,’ can truly say to every group of Christian friends, ‘Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.’ The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.”
3. “Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
4. “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
5. “People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often.”
6. “It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.”
7. “In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets… Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, ‘Here comes one who will augment our loves.’ For in this love ‘to divide is not to take away.”
8. “Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another “What! You too? I thought that no one but myself.”
9. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
10. “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
11.” Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
12.” 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”.
13. “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
14. “you must take a responsible, for better life.”
15. “One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness.”
16. “Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”
17. “If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.”
18. “It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
19. “Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say ‘infinitely’ when you mean ‘very’; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.”
20. “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.”
21. “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
22. “Do not dare not to dare.”
23. “If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. 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.”
24. “Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can’t see it. So quietly submit to be painted i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk, don’t keep on looking at it.”
25. “You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.”
26. “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.”
27. “Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.”
28. “We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.”
29. “Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.
30. “You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words.”
31. “But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.”
32. “Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.”
33. “When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.”
34. “I was with book, as a woman is with child.”
35. “Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.”
36. “Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.”
37. “Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do.”
38. “I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. …I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.”
39. “There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.”
40. “Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for?”
41. “We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”
42. “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
43. “‘Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.’”
44. “It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird 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.”
45. “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.”
46. “Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”
47. “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.”
48. “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.”
49. “Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.”
50. “We meet no ordinary people in our lives.”
51. “Alone among unsympathetic companions, I hold certain views and standards timidly, half ashamed to avow them and half doubtful if they can after all be right. Put me back among my Friends and in half an hour – in ten minutes – these same views and standards become once more indisputable. The opinion of this little circle, while I am in it, outweighs that of a thousand outsiders: as Friendship strengthens, it will do this even when my Friends are far away. For we all wish to be judged by our peers, by the men ‘after our own heart.’ Only they really know our mind and only they judge it by standards we fully acknowledge. Theirs is the praise we really covet and the blame we really dread.”
52. “The very condition of having Friends is that we should want something else besides Friends. Where the truthful answer to the question “Do you see the same truth?” would be “I see nothing and I don’t care about the truth; I only want a Friend,” no Friendship can arise – though Affection of course may. There would be nothing for the Friendship to be about; and Friendship must be about something, even if it were only an enthusiasm for dominoes or white mice. Those who have nothing can share nothing; those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.”
53. “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
54. “You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.”
55. “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.”
56. “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
57. “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.”
58. “Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
59. “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
60. “You can make anything by writing.”
61. “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
62. “A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.”
63. “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.”
64. “I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
65. “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.’”
66. “God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.”
67. “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
68. “Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
69. “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.”
70. “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
71. “Mothers, especially single mothers, are heroic in their efforts to raise our nation’s children, but men must also take responsibility for their children and recognize the impact they have on their families’ well-being.”
72. “You do the best you can. Some days, you feel really good about yourself, and some days, you don’t.”
73. “If you want to stand with me as a single mom, and I know so many of my friends and colleagues do, please don’t appropriate my burden as a way to validate your own. To suggest that you are single-parenting when you are simply solo for the weekend devalues what real single mothers do.”
74. “I am a single mum. What is your superpower?”
75. “It’s not single parenthood in and of itself. It’s more about how people parent.”
76. “The best gift a parent can give children is time. Single moms need to know it’s okay to have a little ‘me’ time.”
77. “I’ve been a single parent for a long time. It reminds me of being a waitress. As you walk back to the kitchen, requests come at you from all sides. You’re doing the job of two. You have to be highly organized.”
78. “You have a good head on your shoulders, and you’ll get yourself to where you need to be, and that’s all you should ask of yourself.”
79. “Better a loving single-parent family than a ‘conventional’ family where the parents hate each other, and the father is a demagogue.”
80. “You know that as a single mom, you are everything to your children. So instead of wondering what went wrong and feeling pity, tell yourself that you have it in you to stand up on your own and face the world, and you truly can.”
81. “It takes one rad mama to be a father too.”
82. “It’s the only way of life I’ve known. I was raised by a single mom.”
83. “There is no role in life that is more essential than that of motherhood.”
84. “A child’s first teacher is its mother.”
85. “I think it’s really important for every mother to find their own way.”
86. “Keep your chin up. Things will work themselves out.”
87. “Each child is biologically required to have a mother. Fatherhood is a well-regarded theory, but motherhood is a fact.”
88. “I was a single mom that raised two bright, beautiful, and compassionate girls.”
89. “Single mom or not, there is no way to be a perfect mother, but there are a million ways to be a good one.”
90. “Dear mama, it doesn’t matter if you are a single mom or not, just remember that you are the best mom for your child and you are doing the best you can.”
91. “I am a single mom and I’m the breadwinner and I have to work and I have to do these things and that’s just the way it is. I don’t think my son even knows any different.”
92. “She has to have four arms, four legs, four eyes, two hearts, and double the love. There is nothing single about a single mom.”
93. “Just because I am a single mother doesn’t mean I cannot be a success.”
94. “Single moms, you are a doctor, a teacher, a nurse, a maid, a cook, a referee, a heroine, a provider, a defender, a protector, a true superwoman. Wear your cape proudly.”
95. “A single mom tries when things are hard. She never gives up. She believes in her family even when things are tough. She knows that above all things, a mother’s love is more than enough.”
96. “You always have to carry on, and you can, because you have to.”
97. “Being a working mother and a working single parent instills in you a sense of determination.”
98. “I would say to any single parent currently feeling the weight of stereotype or stigmatization that I am prouder of my years as a single mother than of any other part of my life.”
99. “Being a single parent made me stronger than ever before.”
100. “‘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.”
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101. “Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better.”
102. “In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine.”
103. “You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.”
104. “To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?”
105. “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”\
106. “Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
107. “But, the truth is that right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called “virtue”, and it is this quality or character that really matters.”
108. “If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.”
109. “We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words – to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
110. “The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
111. “It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.”
112. “But the ordinary rules cannot be worked until we have decided whether miracles are possible, and if so, how probable they are.”
113. “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.”
114. “Every Christian would agree that a man’s spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.”
115. “He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.”
116. “To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
117. “Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”
118. “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
119. “The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”
120. “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
121. “The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us.”
122. “It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”
123. “It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”
124. “Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth.”
125. “Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.”
126. “The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.”
127. “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.”
128. “You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.”
129. “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.”
130. “What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”
131. “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.”
132. “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”
133. “Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment ‘as to the Lord.”
134. “Those who assume that miracles cannot happen are merely wasting their time by looking into the texts: we know in advance what results they will find for they have begun by begging the question.”
135. “If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I would say, ‘Sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.’ I know I am very fortunate in that respect.”
136. “We must both, I’m afraid, recognise that, as we grow older, we become like old cars – more and more repairs and replacements are necessary.”
137. “We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is ‘good,’ because it is good, if ‘bad’ because it works in us patience, humility, and the contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.”
138. “When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.”
139. “Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”
140. “Joy is the serious business of heaven.”
141. “There are only 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.”
142. “The almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self–all your wishes and precautions–to Christ.”
143. “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
144. “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.”
145. “The door on which we have been knocking all our lives will open at last.”
146. “When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”
147. “There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.”
148. “Jesus Christ did not say, “Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.”
149. “To love at all is to be vulnerable.”
150. “The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”
These are 150 C.S. Lewis quotes that inspire and build for all of us about success, life motivation and also the life rules of the figure of C.s. Lewis is a famous writer.