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For they (art and music) are not the thing itself they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.

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
Thing
Tunes
Never
Flower
News
Worshippers
Heard
Visited
Found
Echo
Art
Echoes
Music
Scent
Country
Tune

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut.
C. S. Lewis
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There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
C. S. Lewis
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The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.
C. S. Lewis
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At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C. S. Lewis
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How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself.
C. S. Lewis
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Things never happen the same way twice.
C. S. Lewis
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If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
C. S. Lewis
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In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
C. S. Lewis
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When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
C. S. Lewis
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As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
C. S. Lewis
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Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
C. S. Lewis
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The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord - and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture.
C. S. Lewis
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A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people's rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
C. S. Lewis
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and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.
C. S. Lewis
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I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God. (pg 40)
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
C. S. Lewis
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I wish I had never been born, she said. What are we born for? For infinite happiness, said the Spirit. You can step out into it at any moment...
C. S. Lewis
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Human intellect is incurably abstract.
C. S. Lewis