C. S. Lewis Quotes

My theory is that the way you cope with the depths will ascertain the heights that you reach - they are intimately connected - and if you have a lust for life, you are also going to have a lust for death.

Whatever brings you to your knees in weakness carries the greatest potential for your personal success and spiritual victory.

Everyone tried with me. And everytime, it felt like the whole point of life was to see if trying was ever enough.

No one enjoys feeling weak, whether it is emotionally, spiritually or physically. There is something within the human spirit that wants to resist the thought of weakness. Many times this is nothing more than our human pride at work. Just as weakness carries a great potential for strength, pride carries an equally great potential for defeat.

I will only ever be drawn to people who suffer from that special and fertile anguish called self-doubt, or the thirst for the ideal, and desire for the soul's mystical fire. Self-satisfaction because of some material accomplishment will never be for me. The truly great are those who quest for better spiritual selves.

Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.

I think we are living in pretty scary times and people are looking for inspiration and are also more open to the spiritual possibilities.

Place no hope in the feeling of assurance, in spiritual comfort. You may well have to get along without this. Place no hope in the inspirational preachers of Christian sunshine, who are able to pick you up and set you back on your feet and make you feel good for three or four days-until you fold up and collapse into despair. Self-confidence is a precious natural gift, a sign of health. But it is not the same thing as faith. Faith is much deeper, and it must be deep enough to subsist when we are weak, when we are sick, when our self-confidence is gone, when our self-respect is gone.

Willpower is trying very hard not to do something you want to do very much.

A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.

Of course all life is a process of breaking down, but the blows that do the dramatic side of the work-- the big sudden blows that come, or seem to come, from outside-- the ones you remember and blame things on and, in moments of weakness, tell your friends about, don't show their effect all at once. There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again.

Satan is ever present, trying to destroy our glory and remove our crown. One of his most powerful tools is discouragement. Don't let your discouragement make Satan rejoice.

Do not try to fix whatever comes in your life. Fix yourself in such a way that whatever comes, you will be fine.

Life is an endless, truly endless struggle. There's no time when we're going to arrive at a plateau where the whole thing gets sorted. It's a struggle in the way every plant has to find it's own way to stand up straight. A lot of the time it's a failure. And yet it's not a failure if some enlightenment comes from it.

God is the hardest taskmaster I have known on this earth, and he tries you through and through. And when you find that your faith is failing or your body is failing you, and you are sinking, he comes to your assistance somehow or other and proves to you that you must not lose your faith and that he is always at your beck and call, but on his terms, not on your terms. So I have found. I cannot really recall a single instance when, at the eleventh hour, he has forsaken me.

I am continually trying to find meaning in the world. If we cannot find some ultimate significance or value in our lives, we fall very easily into despair.

It was not the violence of our enemies [in World War I] that would undo us, I thought, but our own spiritual weakness, the shallowness of our convictions.

There are those who say that temptation can be barricaded beyond the door. The ones who think that stray desires can be driven out of the heart like the moneychangers from the temple. Maybe they can, if you patrol your weak points day and night, don't look, don't smell, don't dream.

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

Loneliness doesn’t exist on any single plane of consciousness. It’s generally a low throb, barely audible, like the hum of a Mercedes engine in park, but every so often the demands of the highway call for a burst of acceleration, and the hum becomes a thunderous, elemental roar, and once again you’re reminded of what this baby’s carrying under the hood.

Frequent and violent temptations were a proof that the citadel of the soul had not fallen and that the devil raged to make it fall.

People see it [boxing] as a physical contact sport, but it's not. It's really a spiritual one of will against will. Who wants it the most? How much is he willing to take - and dish out - to get it? It's like fighting is 10 percent physical and 90 percent emotional.

I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to... it's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.

So he tasted the deep pain that is reserved only for the strong, just as he had tasted for a little while the deep happiness.