C. S. Lewis
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"Clive Staples Lewis", commonly known as "C. S. Lewis", was a novelist, poet, academic, medieval studies/medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian, and Christian apologetics/Christian apologist. Born in Belfast, Ireland, he held academic positions at both Oxford University (Magdalen College, Oxford/Magdalen College), 1925–54, and Cambridge University (Magdalene College, Cambridge/Magdalene College), 1954–63. He is best known for his fictional work, especially The Screwtape Letters, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy, and for his non-fiction Christian apologetics, such as Mere Christianity, Miracles (book)/Miracles, and The Problem of Pain.

Lewis and fellow novelist J. R. R. Tolkien were close friends. They both served on the English faculty at Oxford University, and were active in the informal Oxford literary group known as the Inklings. According to Lewis' memoir, Surprised by Joy, he was baptised in the Church of Ireland, but fell away from his faith during adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to the Anglican Communion, becoming an "ordinary layman of the Church of England". His faith profoundly affected on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

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You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.

I believe in God like I believe in the sun, not because I can see it, but because of it all things are seen.

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.

Nothing is beautiful except the abnormal; and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm.

Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.

A pleasure is not full grown until it is remembered.

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.

No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'

It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike.

Pride is a spiritual Cancer: It eats up the very possibilty of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.

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.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, in the end, 'Thy will be done.'

Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

I have found a desire within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.

Whenever you find a man who says he doesn't believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later.

This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

Telling us to obey instinct is like telling us to obey 'people.' People say different things: so do instincts. Our instincts are at war.... Each instinct, if you listen to it, will claim to be gratified at the expense of the rest....

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.

We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.

Badness is only spoiled goodness.

If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

When you reach the thing you were desiring, if it doesn't satisfy you, it was not what you were desiring.

Whatever you do, He [God] will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed Him.

Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than minority of them - never become conscious of them all. How much of total reality can such an apparatus let through?

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.

It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.

If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.

A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional... values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process.

Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.

Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.

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.

Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.