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

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...
C. S. Lewis
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Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
C. S. Lewis
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Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
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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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We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
C. S. Lewis
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Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.
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Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.
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Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very' otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
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Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
C. S. Lewis
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We forgive, we mortify our resentment a week later some chain of thought carries us back to the original offence and we discover the old resentment blazing away as if nothing had been done about it at all. We need to forgive our brother seventy times seven not only for 490 offences but for one offence.
C. S. Lewis
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Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
C. S. Lewis
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Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
C. S. Lewis
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Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.
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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Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again.
C. S. Lewis
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Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.
C. S. Lewis
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You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet.
C. S. Lewis
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If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity with people who are inventing religions. How could we? We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
C. S. Lewis