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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
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
Thinking
Bring
Shakes
Like
Belief
Torture
Less
Beliefs
Comes
Silly
Truth
Senses
Doe
Discover
Verbal
Nothing
Rate
Knocked
Men
Merely
Shake

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.
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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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A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way.
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Most people spend most of their lives doing neither what they want to be doing nor what they ought to be doing.
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Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow.
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What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.
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Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
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Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
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If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.
C. S. Lewis
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There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.
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Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary.
C. S. Lewis
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An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom.
C. S. Lewis
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Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for to make them worth it.
C. S. Lewis
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Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
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I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
C. S. Lewis
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The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.
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When Catholicism goes bad it becomes the religion of amulets and holy places and priestcraft: Protestantism, in its corresponding decay, becomes a vague mist of ethical platitudes
C. S. Lewis
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Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
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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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In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love.
C. S. Lewis