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C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis Quotes

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Famous C. S. Lewis Quotes

“You asked for a loving God: you have one... The consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes.”

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Author:C. S. Lewis
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“Once in those very early days my brother brought into the nursery the lid of a biscuit tin which he had covered with moss and garnished with twigs and flowers so as to make it a toy garden or a toy forest. That was the first beauty I ever knew. What the real garden had failed to do, the toy garden did. It made me aware of nature-not, indeed, as a storehouse of forms and colors but as something cool, dewy, fresh, exuberant....As long as I live my imagination of Paradise will retain something of my brother's toy garden.”

FirstsLongMadeRealHappinessFormImaginationColorBrotherFlowerGardenForestsMy BrotherParadiseCoveredToysMy ImaginationNurseryMossTinBiscuitsTwigs
Book:Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life
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“And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.”

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Book:The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis
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“Christianity does not involve the belief that all things were made for man. it does involve the belief that god loves man and for his sake became man and died.”

MenDoeMadeGodChristianFaithJesusBeliefReligiousChristianityLordBecomingAll ThingsMiracleDiedCriticsSakeChristian InspirationalGod LoveNovelistsTrust In GodTheologianCommitment To GodInvolvingConfidence In GodServant Of GodLecturerGreatness Of GodFollowing JesusMighty GodEssayistsBroadcasters
Book:Miracles: A Preliminary Study
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“For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God has made the world- that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colors and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again.”

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Book:What Christians Believe
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“Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water...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.”

IfsWorldWantFeelsWellsMadeDesireWaterBornThis WorldBabyCreaturesHungerSatisfactionExplanationSwimAnother WorldDucklings
Author:C. S. Lewis
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“All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it, tantalizing glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest - if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself - you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.'”

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Author:C. S. Lewis
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“In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers - a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians - a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should.”

IfsMenWorldGivingShouldMadeWarGovernmentOrderAsksIndividualWishChurchLordHellBearsTerribleDoctorsBlameSlaveBoundsAncientWitchDoctor WhoBargainsBarbariansBlame MeAncient WorldBlindfoldsWitch Doctors
Author:C. S. Lewis
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“A faith in culture is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. Culture as a collective name for certain very valuable activities is a permissible word; but culture hypostatized, set up on its own, made into a faith, a cause, a banner, a platform, is unendurable. For none of the activities in question cares a straw for that faith or cause. It is like a return to early Semitic religion where names themselves were regarded as powers.”

MadeCareCertainCultureNamesCausesExpressionReturnActivityValuableCollectivesPlatformsStrawsBannerUnendurableCulture And Religion
Author:C. S. Lewis
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