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If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious bad man is the worst of all.

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
Religious
Religion
Doe
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Much
Make
Worse
Men
Lived
People
Worst

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If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'
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If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
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Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.
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Those who tread 'adult' as a term of approval cannot hope to be considered adult themselves. When I became a man I put away childish things, along with the desire to be very grown up.
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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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The most intense joy, lies not in the having, but in the desire, Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal, Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach...Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C.S. Lewis
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
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The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
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You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.
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At home, besides being Peter or Jane, we also bear a general character husband or wife, brother or sister, chief, colleague or subordinate. Not among Friends. It is an affair of disentangled, or stripped, minds. Eros will have naked bodies Friendship naked personalities.
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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.
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Watchin' and listenin' is the thing at present not talking.
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All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl! Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.
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There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.
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Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.
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After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required.
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
C. S. Lewis
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Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him.
C. S. Lewis
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And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
C. S. Lewis