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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
Conceive
Pretending
Distinction
Morality
Beginning
Moral
Reality
Hounds
Better
Finer

More quotes by 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). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
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Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
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You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.
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As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
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A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him.
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I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
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I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
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The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
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If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.
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I am in love and out of it I will not go.
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To every man, in his acquaintance with a new art, there comes a moment when that which before was meaningless first lifts, as it were, one corner of the curtain that hides its mystery, and reveals, in a burst of delight which later and fuller understanding can hardly ever equal, one glimpse of the indefinite possibilities within.
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There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
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When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
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But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself and am never more myself than when I do.
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The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation reminding us we are not quite at home here.
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I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was Feed my sheep, not Try experiments on my rats, or even Teach my performing dogs new tricks.
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All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.
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We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
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The world was made partly that there may be prayer partly that our prayers might be answered.
C. S. Lewis