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There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

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
Happiness
Makes
Kind
Good
Jokes
Waste
Joy
Serious
Wonder

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An obligation to feel can freeze feelings.
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A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother nor an adult who turns to his fellow for company. Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.
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Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
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The only people who hate escapism are jailers.
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Don't bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior
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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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Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good.
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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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It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
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I prefer being honest to being 'honest to God.'
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We are not living in a world where all roads are radii if a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork you must make a decision.
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I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.
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The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
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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 emotion is, in itself, a judgement in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
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I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
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But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
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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
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The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
C. S. Lewis
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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