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We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

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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Essayist
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Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
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Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Perfect
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants everyone to use what sense they have.
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The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.
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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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Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
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When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.
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I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.
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It's not a question of God 'sending' us to Hell. In each of us there is something growing up which will of itself be Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.
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No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?
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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.
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Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life.
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Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
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Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
C. S. Lewis
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We have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
C. S. Lewis
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But do you really mean, Sir, said Peter, that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that? Nothing is more probable, said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.
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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.
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and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing a very serious thing indeed.
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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.
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There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.
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if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.
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