“I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. ”
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C.S. Lewis
“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If I discover within myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.”
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C.S. Lewis
“[The devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”
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C.S. Lewis
“It is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?”
―
C.S. Lewis
“You cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“...a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.”
―
C.S. Lewis
