C.S. Lewis

“Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present,

we are eternal in God’s eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.”

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

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There are usually two reasons for writing an imaginative work,

which may be called the Author’s reason and the Man’s. If only one of these is present,

then, so far as I am concerned, the book will not be written.

If the first is lacking, it can’t; if the second is lacking, it shouldn’t.

C.S. Lewis, Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said

(found in the collection On Stories)

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“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…

to find the place where all the beauty came from.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

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“…both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective…

They say of some temporal suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’

not knowing that Heaven, once attained,

will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.”

C. S. Lewis

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“Truth and falsehood are opposed;

but truth is the norm not of truth only but of falsehood also.”

C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love

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“The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid on my back,

a load so heavy that only humility can carry it,

and the backs of the proud will be broken.”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

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“There are no variations except for those who know a norm,

and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.”

C.S. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism

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“The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude

which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.”

C.S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

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“Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations

being honest and fair and kind to each other.”

C.S. Lewis, Case for Christianity

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“In coming to understand anything

we are rejecting the facts as they are for us

in favour of the facts as they are.”

C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

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“They do not get their qualities from a class:

they belong to that class because they have those qualities.”

C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

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“Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer

than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it already.”

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

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“There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious.

It is too good to waste on jokes.”

C.S Lewis, The Last Battle

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“Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done…”

C.S Lewis, Letters to an American Lady

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“We’re not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us;

we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.” (29 April 1959)

Letters of C.S. Lewis

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“Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did)

can fully taste the horror of death.” (c. September 1940)

Letters of C.S. Lewis

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“Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned?”

C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm

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“‘Safe?’ said Mr. Beaver…’Who said anything about safe?

‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.’”

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

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“It is in their ‘good’ characters that novelists make, unawares,

the most shocking self- revelations.”

C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost

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“A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers -

including even his power to revolt…

It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.”

C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost

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“‘You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you,’” said the Lion.”

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

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“I’m on Aslan’s side even if there isn’t any Aslan to lead it.

I’m going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn’t any Narnia.”

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

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“The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.”

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

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“The very nature of Joy makes nonsense

of our common distinction between having and wanting.”

C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

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“Nothing is yet in its true form.”

C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

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“Authority exercised with humility,

and obedience accepted with delight

are the very lines along which our spirits live.”

C.S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Addresses

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“Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.”

C.S. Lewis, (in Foreword to Joy Davidman’s Smoke on the Mountain)

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“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses,

to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to

may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship,

or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare.”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

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“We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness…”

C.S. Lewis, Transposition and Other Addresses

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“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy,

the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it,

to suggest the real thing.

If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise,

or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings,

and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else

of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage.

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country,

which I shall not find till after death;

I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside;

I must make it the main object of life

to press on to that other country and help others do the same.”

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

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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.”

C.S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms

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” We ought to give thanks for all fortune:

if it is good, because it is good,

if bad because it works in us patience, humility and the contempt of this world

and the hope of our eternal country”

Letters: C.S. Lewis / Don Giovanni Calabria (August 10, 1948)

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“Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.”

C.S. Lewis

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“We are what we believe we are.”

C. S. Lewis

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“We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private:

and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.”

C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses

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“Love is not affectionate feeling,

but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”

C. S. Lewis, Answers to Questions on Christianity

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“And then she understood the devilish cunning of the enemies’ plan.

By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger.”

C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

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“What flows into you from myth is not truth but reality

(truth is always ABOUT something, but reality is that ABOUT WHICH truth is), and, therefore,

every myth becomes the father of innumerable truths on the abstract level.

C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” God in the Dock

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