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Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.

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
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Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Quality
Start
Often
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Behaving
Already

More quotes by 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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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've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.
C. S. Lewis
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The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil.
C. S. Lewis
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I want God, not my idea of God.
C. S. Lewis
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Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
C. S. Lewis
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I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
C. S. Lewis
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There seems no plan because it is all plan.
C. S. Lewis
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A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.
C. S. Lewis
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I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion almost purely philosophical. I didn't want to. I'm not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.
C. S. Lewis
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In our own case we accept excuses too easily in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.
C. S. Lewis
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I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms, said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
C. S. Lewis
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Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.
C. S. Lewis
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Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering) she will help to show what it means.
C. S. Lewis
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...if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state.
C. S. Lewis
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But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
C. S. Lewis
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Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous.
C. S. Lewis
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If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
C. S. Lewis
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Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.
C. S. Lewis
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You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
C. S. Lewis