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We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.

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
Anything
Physically
Need
Loneliness
Needs
Discover
Even
Fully
Soon
Conscious
Intellectually
Born
Emotionally
Others
Helpless

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
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A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.
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You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?
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God knows our situation He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
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Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
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I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
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And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
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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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[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
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Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
C. S. Lewis
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A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.
C. S. Lewis
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I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment the little daily dose.
C. S. Lewis
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Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.
C. S. Lewis
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When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
C. S. Lewis
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The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said
C. S. Lewis
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Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
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I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
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The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
C. S. Lewis
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If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.
C. S. Lewis
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I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present one of those black moods in which nearly all one's friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil.
C. S. Lewis