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Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
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Literary Critic
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Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
C. S. Lewis
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Whenever a person dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people's religions, he is in a bad condition.
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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The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word love.
C. S. Lewis
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Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves.
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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Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.
C. S. Lewis
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There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'
C. S. Lewis
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The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.
C. S. Lewis
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Friendship is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
C. S. Lewis
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We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.
C. S. Lewis
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Oh, I'm a dangerous criminal, I am,' said the dwarf cheerfully.
C. S. Lewis
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Hatred obscures all distinctions.
C. S. Lewis
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Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
C. S. Lewis
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One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
C. S. Lewis
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But why,... if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.
C. S. Lewis
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Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.
C. S. Lewis
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Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace>Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
C. S. Lewis
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I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.
C. S. Lewis
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It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.
C. S. Lewis