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We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.

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
Story
Leisure
Enjoy
Laid
Given
Lust
Stories
Narrative
Savour
Firsts
Till
Rereading
First
Curiosity
Beauties
Real
Fully
Asleep
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Sheer

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.
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'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'.
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In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
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Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
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If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
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Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.
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Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.
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There seems no plan because it is all plan.
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Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.
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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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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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You die and die and then you are beyond death.
C. S. Lewis
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God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way.
C. S. Lewis
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The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us.
C. S. Lewis
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Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all.
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A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.
C. S. Lewis
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The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.
C. S. Lewis
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Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one.
C. S. Lewis
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On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, . . . they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally.
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Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.
C. S. Lewis