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There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he has read them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?

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
Thinking
Thinks
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Boswell
Read
Sonnets
Hope
Settles
Matter
Sonnet
Never
Shakespeare
Men
Settling

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
C. S. Lewis
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The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
C. S. Lewis
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For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
C. S. Lewis
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I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time...The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give up.
C. S. Lewis
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All schools both here and in America should teach far fewer subjects far better.
C. S. Lewis
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I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
C. S. Lewis
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How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
C. S. Lewis
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Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.
C. S. Lewis
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Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect.
C. S. Lewis
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You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.
C. S. Lewis
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When we want to be something other than the thing that God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy...whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
C. S. Lewis
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Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.
C. S. Lewis
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Hatred obscures all distinctions.
C. S. Lewis
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The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.
C. S. Lewis
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The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably).
C. S. Lewis
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Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.
C. S. Lewis
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True friends... face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals.
C. S. Lewis
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What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
C. S. Lewis
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Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.
C. S. Lewis
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If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination.
C. S. Lewis