C. S. Lewis Quotes About Past

• We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely

  C. S. Lewis

  Meaningful, Future, Past

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

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Inspirational, Life

• The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Past, Law

• Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mother, Father, Past

• The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them,and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols,breaking the hearts of their worshippers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

  C. S. Lewis

  Country, Memories, Flower

• Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

  C. S. Lewis

  Gratitude, Fear, Grateful

  1942 The Screwtape Letters, no.15.

• We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Past, Evil

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Letters to an American Lady”, p.103, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Dream, Religious

• You have a traitor there, Aslan," said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he'd been through and after the talk he'd had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn't seem to matter what the Witch said.

  C. S. Lewis

  Morning, Past, Thinking

  C. S. LEWIS (1950). “THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE”

• The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.

  C. S. Lewis

  Past, Rays, Frozen

  C. S. LEWIS (1961). “The Screwtape Letters & Screwtape Proposes a Toast”

• In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Past, Offering

  "The Problem of Pain". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1940.

• The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past.

  C. S. Lewis

  Past, Knowing, Recent Past

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Selected Literary Essays”, p.12, Cambridge University Press

• The road to the promised land runs past Sinai.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Past, Land

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.

  C. S. Lewis

  Past, Men, Heaven

• The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Past, Guiding Principles

• For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex

  C. S. Lewis

  Sex, Lying, Past

• It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.

  C. S. Lewis

  Friendship, Sex, Past

• Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.

  C. S. Lewis

  Past, Needs, Study

• The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four.

  C. S. Lewis

  Past, Tea, Four

  C. S. Lewis (1966). “Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life”, p.152, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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