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

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
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We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.
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Each time you fall He'll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection
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Once in our world, a Stable had something in it that was bigger than our whole world.
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A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
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A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth.
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Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth.
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The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!
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Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good.
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Remember He is the artist and you are the picture. You can’t see it, you can't see your true self. So quietly submit to be painted.
C. S. Lewis
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But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are on concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
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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.
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Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
C. S. Lewis
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A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.
C. S. Lewis
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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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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
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Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again.
C. S. Lewis
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You must be asking which door is the true one not which pleases you best
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
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The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.
C. S. Lewis