C. S. Lewis Quotes
Irish author, scholar of medieval literature, and Christian apologist. He is best known for his essays on Christianity and for the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia.
(1898 - 1963)
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A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
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A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
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A woman means by unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. Thus each sex regards the other as basically selfish.
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
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Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
[Affection]
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Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
[Goals]
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All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
[Change]
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An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
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Christianity, if false, is not important. If Christianity is true, however, it is of infinite importance. What it cannot be is moderately important.
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Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
[Courage]
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Do not waste time bothering whether you "love" your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
[Faith]
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Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
[Big]
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Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
[Education]
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Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
[Bodies]
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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.
[Art]
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Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
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Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
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Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
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Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
[Art]
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