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Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache it is our nature.

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
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Alas, said Aslan, shaking his head. It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart's desire she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. 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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We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
C. S. Lewis
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Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.
C. S. Lewis
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What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
C. S. Lewis
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Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'
C. S. Lewis
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Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.
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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I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.
C. S. Lewis
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I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries'.
C. S. Lewis
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There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.
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.
C. S. Lewis
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To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you.
C. S. Lewis
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What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
C. S. Lewis
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To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
C. S. Lewis
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The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
C. S. Lewis
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If the world is meaningless, then so are we if we mean something, we do not mean alone.
C. S. Lewis
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Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
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When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.
C. S. Lewis
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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
C. S. Lewis
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Have you not seen that in our days Of any whose story, song or art Delights us, our sincerest praise Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart?
C. S. Lewis