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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?

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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Belfast
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Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like like players in one band, or organs in one body.
C. S. Lewis
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The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
C. S. Lewis
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The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ.
C. S. Lewis
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Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.
C. S. Lewis
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There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
C. S. Lewis
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Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
C. S. Lewis
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I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present one of those black moods in which nearly all one's friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil.
C. S. Lewis
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The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.
C. S. Lewis
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Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.
C. S. Lewis
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But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another.
C. S. Lewis
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The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
C. S. Lewis
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Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache it is our nature.
C. S. Lewis
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Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
C. S. Lewis
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At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
C. S. Lewis
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The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.
C. S. Lewis
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That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
C. S. Lewis