C. S. Lewis Quotes About Effort

• ...here also forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does. They think that if you ask them to forgive someone who has cheated or bullied them you are trying to make out that there was really no cheating or bullying. But if that were so, there would be nothing to forgive. (This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart - every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out.)

  C. S. Lewis

  Bullying, Cheating, Hurt

• The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you.

  C. S. Lewis

  Effort, Enemy, Company

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 - 1963”, p.106, Harper Collins

• Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Journey, Air

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.122, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Now we cannot...discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going tobring us home. All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do this. I can't.

  C. S. Lewis

  Home, Law, Ideas

• What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Writing, Fire

• By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the the impossible.

  C. S. Lewis

  Clever, Believe, Mean

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.154, Simon and Schuster

• Each time you fall He'll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection

  C. S. Lewis

  Fall, Perfection, Effort

• Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam--he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Effort, Acting

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.64, HarperCollins UK

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