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A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
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Belfast
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Clive Hamilton
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Clive Staples Lewis
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More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask.
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When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
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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.
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Alas, said Aslan, shaking his head. It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart's desire she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want they do not always like it.
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Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
C. S. Lewis
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I think we must attack -- wherever we meet it -- the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.
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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We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
C. S. Lewis
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Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.
C. S. Lewis
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood we write in order to understand.
C. S. Lewis
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A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible.
C. S. Lewis
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The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.
C. S. Lewis
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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?
C. S. Lewis
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Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
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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If a man is going to write on chemistry, he learns chemistry. The same is true of Christianity.
C. S. Lewis
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Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which.
C. S. Lewis
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The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.
C. S. Lewis
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Where men are forbidden to honour a king, they honor millionaires, athletes, or film stars instead even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served deny it food and it will gobble poison.
C. S. Lewis
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Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.
C. S. Lewis