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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
Better
Much
Make
Worse
Men
Lived
People
Worst

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But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
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The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
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The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
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That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality.
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God is the food our spirits were designed to feed on.
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A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. One can't put the difference into words. When the man is a friend it may become painful: the old footing is not easy to recover.
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I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.
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No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
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I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment the little daily dose.
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When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only person in the world.
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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?
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Friendship is...the sort of love one can imagine between angels.
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A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him.
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Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves.
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Five senses an incurably abstract intellect a haphazardly selective memory a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.
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The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
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Before God closed in on me, I was offered what now appears a moment of wholly free choice. But I feel my decision was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair.
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God is not an optional extra, He's an absolute must!
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I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.
C. S. Lewis
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Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself
C. S. Lewis