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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood we write in order to understand.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
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Belfast
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Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
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Afflictions are... if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ
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And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
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When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.
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The command Be ye prfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He said (in the Bible) that we were gods and he is going to make good his words. He will make us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature...a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly.
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Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.
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I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
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What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
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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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I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality. . . asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.
C. S. Lewis
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We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.
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If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
C. S. Lewis
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The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else...no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden.
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The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.
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We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
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If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
C. S. Lewis
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The most intense joy, lies not in the having, but in the desire, Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal, Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach...Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C.S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis
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God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous
C. S. Lewis