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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.

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
Better
Christianity
Men
Getting
Less
Faith
Badness
Evil
Godly
Left
Understands
Stills
Clearly
Still
Worse

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Safe?” said Mr. Beaver “don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.
C. S. Lewis
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Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
C. S. Lewis
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I thought I could describe a state make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.
C. S. Lewis
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Here. All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.
C. S. Lewis
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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung.
C. S. Lewis
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Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is)... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
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
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If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most, or else just silly.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me.
C. S. Lewis
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The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Our charities should pinch and hamper us. If we live at the same level of affluence as other people who have our level of income, we are probably giving away too little.
C. S. Lewis
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Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not.
C. S. Lewis
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When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.
C. S. Lewis
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People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. Lewis
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
C. S. Lewis
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Tea should be taken in solitude.
C. S. Lewis
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For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.
C. S. Lewis
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Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
C. S. Lewis
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If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
C. S. Lewis
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Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.
C. S. Lewis