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For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.

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
Never
Read
Boys
People
Girl
Taught
Essay
True
Differences
Essays
Stories
Hear
Whereas
Wanted
Heard
English
Writing
Anyone
Telling
Thing
Story
Girls
Made
Whether
Difference

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One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
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Thirst was made for water inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.
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Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.
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I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.
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Christ did not die for man because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because he is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.
C. S. Lewis
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The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.
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Golly,' said Edmund under his breath, 'He's a retired star.
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If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.
C. S. Lewis
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The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden...A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it.
C. S. Lewis
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It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.
C. S. Lewis
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God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis
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Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
C. S. Lewis
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All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.
C. S. Lewis
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You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give.
C. S. Lewis
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To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you.
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The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.
C. S. Lewis
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I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.
C. S. Lewis
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Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose it is simply a description of what going back is like.
C. S. Lewis
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Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
C. S. Lewis
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There is someone I accept even though I do not approve of all he does...and that someone is me
C. S. Lewis