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We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.

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
Thing
Despair
Perfection
Worst
Less
Anything
Fatal
Need
Forgiven
Needs
Failures
Even
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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But do you really mean, Sir, said Peter, that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that? Nothing is more probable, said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.
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No time for better words, no time to unsay anything. -Til We Have Faces
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When I'm older I'll understand said Lucy, I am older and I don't think I want to understand, replied Edmund
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I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.
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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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We cannot fully understand the relations of time and choice until we are beyond both.
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You must be asking which door is the true one not which pleases you best
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What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
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The whole journey was odd and dream-like -- the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead.
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To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
C. S. Lewis
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On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
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If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.
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When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
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More like the real thing,' said the lord Digory softly. - The Last Battle
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First be sure that you know exactly what you want to say. Then be sure you have said exactly that.
C. S. Lewis
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Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.
C. S. Lewis
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Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
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It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
C. S. Lewis
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I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him.
C. S. Lewis
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They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
C. S. Lewis