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My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose.

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
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Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
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I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time...The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give up.
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If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.
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The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be like real life in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
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In the truest sense, Christian pilgrims have the best of both worlds. We have joy whenever this world reminds us of the next, and we take solace whenever it does not.
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It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.
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It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.
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God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
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Disobedience to conscience is voluntary bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
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Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'
C. S. Lewis
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We are finite and God will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.
C. S. Lewis
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You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.
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Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
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The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
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Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
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It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
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If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
C. S. Lewis
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But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are on concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
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