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Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

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
Make
Stupider
Narnia
Succeed
Trouble
Religion
Often
Trying
Really

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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.
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I prefer being honest to being 'honest to God.'
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Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
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Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.
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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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Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, I am what I do.
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The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
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We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
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Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
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It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.
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We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
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You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.
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The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.
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Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.
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You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow.
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If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
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Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
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Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride.
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Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.
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Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes that is, in our deepest reality.
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