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Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only liked: it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.

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
Takes
Sense
Art
Really
Startles
Good
Captive
Never
Captives
Enjoyed
Liked

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By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated.
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But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.
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There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.
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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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Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I for one must get it out.
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The absent are easily refuted.
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Something of God... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself.
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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.
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When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
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Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.'
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In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out. - Mere Christianity
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The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
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He cannot tempt to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
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For they (art and music) are not the thing itself they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.
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Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
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When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall.
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Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease?
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Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose it is simply a description of what going back is like.
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Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that suits him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
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Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?
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