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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
Ever
Simply
Caring
Without
Literature
Originals
Even
Times
Original
Trying
Often
Nine
Bothers
Men
Tell
Ten
Originality
Art
Mere
Noticed
Become
Creativity
Whereas
Truth
Told
Bother

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Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
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We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
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I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end that the doors of hell are locked on the inside.
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The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything.
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Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come?
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The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
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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.
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Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.
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For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being.
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Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
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I could well believe that it is God's intention, since we have refused milder remedies, to compel [Christians] into unity, by persecution even. Satan is without doubt nothing else than a hammer in the hand of a benevolent and severe God.
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Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only liked: it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
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Joy is the serious business of heaven.
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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.
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We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
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God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.
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We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
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And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?
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It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
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God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.
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