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To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.

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
Lies
Incessant
Lying
Autobiography
Lost
Propaganda
Also
Satan
Give
Paradise
Giving
Admire
Thinking
Misery
World
Vote
Wishful

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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And He [God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble--delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.
C. S. Lewis
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When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!
C. S. Lewis
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Reason is the natural order of truth but imagination is the organ of meaning.
C. S. Lewis
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God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us.
C. S. Lewis
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood we write in order to understand.
C. S. Lewis
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Ah, poor Pole. It's been to much for her, this last bit. Turned her head, I shouldn't wonder. She's beginning to see things.
C. S. Lewis
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And she never could remember and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
C. S. Lewis
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If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'
C. S. Lewis
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Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity.
C. S. Lewis
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When we want to be something other than the thing that God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy...whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
C. S. Lewis
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Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.
C. S. Lewis
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Thirst was made for water inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.
C. S. Lewis
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Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
C. S. Lewis
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No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
C. S. Lewis
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But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want they do not always like it.
C. S. Lewis
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And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
C. S. Lewis
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The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred
C. S. Lewis
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The command Be ye prfect is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He said (in the Bible) that we were gods and he is going to make good his words. He will make us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature...a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly.
C. S. Lewis
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Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny.
C. S. Lewis
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The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
C. S. Lewis