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For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.

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
Reality
Applied
Problem
Conform
Soul
Alike
Men
Wishes
Magic
Wise
Subdue
Wish
Cardinal
Science
Cardinals

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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.
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All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
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Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited.
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We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I In a Berkshire bar. The big workman Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe All the evening, from his empty mug With gleaming eye glanced towards us: I seen 'em myself! he said fiercely.
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Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
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Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.
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I am a product [...of] endless books.
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It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
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If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit.
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You all know, said the Guide, that security is mortals' greatest enemy.
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Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different.
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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.
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Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
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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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There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is......me.
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I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
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No man who says, 'I'm as good as you,' believes it. He would not say it if he did.
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What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
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God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
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Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.
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