Quote

Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.

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
Good
Fiction
Excused
Like
Higher
Qualifying
Quality
Inquiring
Less
Examination
May
Entertaining
Book
Qualities
Must
Provide
Every
Entertainment

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.
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Everything except God has some natural superior everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
C. S. Lewis
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Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
C. S. Lewis
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Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.
C. S. Lewis
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The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
C. S. Lewis
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All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?
C. S. Lewis
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The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!
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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Wouldn't he know without being asked?' said Polly. 'I've no doubt he would,' said the Horse (still with his mouth full). 'But I've a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.
C. S. Lewis
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The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.
C. S. Lewis
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I prefer being honest to being 'honest to God.'
C. S. Lewis
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The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
C. S. Lewis
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Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.
C. S. Lewis
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The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
C. S. Lewis
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A world of automata – of creatures that worked like machines – would hardly be worth creating.
C. S. Lewis
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and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing a very serious thing indeed.
C. S. Lewis
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Enemy occupied territory is what the world is.
C. S. Lewis
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Our problem with desire is that we want too little.
C. S. Lewis
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I believe that many who find that nothing happens when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
C. S. Lewis
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Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
C. S. Lewis