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The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

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
Reality
Hounds
Better
Finer
Conceive
Pretending
Distinction
Morality
Beginning
Moral

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.
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Children are not deceived by fairy-tales they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.
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Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
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Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
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Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
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Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life.
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Fools! said the man, stamping his foot with rage. That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I'd better have been drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams — dreams, do you understand — come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.
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The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal.
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Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
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When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child you don't understand.
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The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.
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Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want
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Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
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The love of knowledge is a kind of madness.
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The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably).
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I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
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We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.
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Oh, I'm a dangerous criminal, I am,' said the dwarf cheerfully.
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The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
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We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.
C. S. Lewis