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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Without
Literature
Originals
Even
Times
Original
Trying
Often
Nine
Bothers
Men
Tell
Ten
Originality
Art
Mere
Noticed
Become
Creativity
Whereas
Truth
Told
Bother
Ever
Simply
Caring

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
C. S. Lewis
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I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
C. S. Lewis
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We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise.
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Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
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Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
C. S. Lewis
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When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.
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What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.
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We thought the Duke would have been pleased if the King's Majesty would have married his daughter, but nothing came of that--' Squints, and has freckles,' said Caspian. Oh, poor girl,' said Lucy.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him... - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory
C. S. Lewis
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The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
C. S. Lewis
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I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
C. S. Lewis
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Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables.
C. S. Lewis
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You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.
C. S. Lewis
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The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.
C. S. Lewis
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A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother nor an adult who turns to his fellow for company. Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.
C. S. Lewis
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You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.
C. S. Lewis
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Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.
C. S. Lewis
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God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.
C. S. Lewis
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Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.
C. S. Lewis