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'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.

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
Necessity
Tyranny
Useful
Liberty
Freedom
Always
Plea
Tyrant
Tyrants

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We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person.
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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.
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I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
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The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.
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We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
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With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
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What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
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The world was made partly that there may be prayer partly that our prayers might be answered.
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It takes all sorts to make a world or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
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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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Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.
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Even I never dreamed of Magic like this!
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The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
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You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself [Matthew 18:12-14 Luke 15:3-7]. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His.
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...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.
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God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like like players in one band, or organs in one body.
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Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
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Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.
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Those who have nothing can share nothing those who are going nowhere can have no fellow-travellers.
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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.
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