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You can’t get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first.

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
Putting
Second
Firsts
First
Things

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The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
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I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment the little daily dose.
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Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
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Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
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Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it the old Christian rule is, Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.
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There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
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I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.
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Prosperity knits a man to the world.
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There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'
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After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required.
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Friendship is born at that moment when a single particular person claims to a different: 'What! You far too? I assumed I was the only real one particular.
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Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure.
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The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.
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At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies Friendship naked personalities.
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The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood we write in order to understand.
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When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
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Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give.
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To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.
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If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.
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