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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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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
Conceive
Simply
Solely
Wisdom
Bringing
Existence
Author
Beauty
Reflection
Term
Terms
Art
Exist
Trying
Embody
Never
Eternal

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.
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What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects--with their Christianity latent.
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The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
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Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
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Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself
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The absent are easily refuted.
C. S. Lewis
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We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
C. S. Lewis
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God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
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Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority... Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada.
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I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
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Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. Lewis
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Christ did not die for man because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because he is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely.
C. S. Lewis
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Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He's been a brick.
C. S. Lewis
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Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
C. S. Lewis
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A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.
C. S. Lewis
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[Something] does not rise to the dignity of error.
C. S. Lewis
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God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
C. S. Lewis
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God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
C. S. Lewis
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Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often quite mistaken as to what their motives are.
C. S. Lewis
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There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, Thy will be done, and those to whom God says, in the end, Thy will be done. All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is op
C. S. Lewis