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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.

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
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?
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The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event.
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A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.
C. S. Lewis
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God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.
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Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
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You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.
C. S. Lewis
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All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
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The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.
C. S. Lewis
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Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it when you do is another question.
C. S. Lewis
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
C. S. Lewis
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The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.
C. S. Lewis
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Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
C. S. Lewis
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Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
C. S. Lewis
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Jesus Christ did not say, 'Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.'
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Hell is a state of mind -- ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind -- is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly.
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
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When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
C. S. Lewis
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If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.
C. S. Lewis
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Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.
C. S. Lewis