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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.

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
Literature
Reality
Doe
Competencies
Adds
Describe
Add
Simply

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
C. S. Lewis
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Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
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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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
C. S. Lewis
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...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.
C. S. Lewis
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We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
C. S. Lewis
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On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
C. S. Lewis
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And in that far distant day when the gods become wholly beautiful, or we at last are shown how beautiful they always were, this will happen more and more. For mortals, as you said, will become more and more jealous. And mother and wife and child and friend will all be in league to keep a soul from being united with the Divine Nature.
C. S. Lewis
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We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts.
C. S. Lewis
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The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.
C. S. Lewis
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The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
C. S. Lewis
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I was wondering — I mean — could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. You would not have called me unless I had been calling you.
C. S. Lewis
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The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.
C. S. Lewis
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Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.
C. S. Lewis
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To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'
C. S. Lewis
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A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.
C. S. Lewis
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The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?
C. S. Lewis
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That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.
C. S. Lewis
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If there is equality it is in His love, not in us.
C. S. Lewis