Explore the most impactful and insightful quotes and sayings by C.s. Lewis, and enrich your perspective with the wisdom. Share these inspiring C.s. Lewis quotes pictures with your friends on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, completely free. Here are the top 2339 C.s. Lewis quotes for you to read and share.

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Friends are like coals in a fire - together, they glow; apart, they grow cold. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once very near the end I said, 'If you can
if it is allowed
come to me when I too am on my death bed.' 'Allowed!' she said. 'Heaven would have a job to hold me; and as for Hell, I'd break it into bits. -- C.s. Lewis
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We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon ... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void. -- C.s. Lewis
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Before we can be cured, we must want to be cured. -- C.s. Lewis
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No one can teach riding so well as a horse. -- C.s. Lewis
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Unattainability. The most intense joy lies not in the having, but in
the desiring. The delight that never fades, the bliss that is eternal,
is only yours when what you most desire is just out of your reach. -- C.s. Lewis
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What does not satisfy when we find it, was not the thing we were desiring. -- C.s. Lewis
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In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful. -- C.s. Lewis
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Because the game of hide-and-seek was still going on, it took Edmund and Lucy some time to find the others. But when at last they were -- C.s. Lewis
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Now God, who has made us, knows what we are and that our happiness lies in Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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No doubt those who really founded modern science were usually those whose love of truth exceeded their love of power. -- C.s. Lewis
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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 -- C.s. Lewis
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Humans are very seldom either totally sincere or totally hypocritical. Their moods change, their motives are mixed, and they are often quite mistaken as to what their motives are. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sleep came like a fruit which falls into the hand almost before you have touched it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become. -- C.s. Lewis
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And certainly both Horses were doing, if not all they could, all they thought they could; which is not quite the same thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Believers in progress rightly note that in the world of machines the new model supersedes the old; from this they falsely infer a similar kind of supercession in such things as virtue and wisdom. -- C.s. Lewis
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Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood. -- C.s. Lewis
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The notion that everyone would like Christianity to be true, and therefore all atheists are brave men who have accepted the defeat of all their deepest desires, is simply impudent nonsense. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. -- C.s. Lewis
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It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past ... -- C.s. Lewis
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We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God. -- C.s. Lewis
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While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend. -- C.s. Lewis
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We meet like sovereign princes of independent states, abroad, on neutral ground, freed from our contexts -- C.s. Lewis
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The modern idea of a Great Man is one who stands at the lonely extremity of some single line of development
-- C.s. Lewis
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It is not that we do not believe the Lord wants the best for us. It is that we wonder how painful the best will be. -- C.s. Lewis
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I write for the unlearned about things in which I am unlearned myself. -- C.s. Lewis
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The creatures are always accusing one another of wanting 'to eat the cake and have it'; but thanks to our labours they are more often in the predicament of paying for the cake and not eating it. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is, no doubt, impossible to prevent his praying for his mother, but we have means of rendering the prayers innocuous. Make sure they are always very 'spiritual', that he is always concerned with the state of her soul and never with her rheumatism. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you give up a bit of work don't (unless it is hopelessly bad) throw it away. Put it in a drawer. It may come in useful later. Much of my best work, or what I think my best, is the re-writing of things begun and abandoned years earlier. -- C.s. Lewis
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People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often. -- C.s. Lewis
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His hands had been reddened, like all men's hands, in the slaying before the foundation of the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn't been ignored; it's been considered & refused for your ultimate good. -- C.s. Lewis
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His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say. -- C.s. Lewis
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Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again. -- C.s. Lewis
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Things always work according to their nature. -- C.s. Lewis
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My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? -- C.s. Lewis
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We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every contact you make with everyone you meet will help them or hinder them on their journey to heaven. -- C.s. Lewis
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And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes. -- C.s. Lewis
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Reepicheep: Unhand the tail. Aslan the Great gave me this tail and no one, repeat, no one, touches the tail. Period, exclamation mark! -- C.s. Lewis
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A girl should be so lost in God that a man has to seek Him to find her. -- C.s. Lewis
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But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even when I feared and detested Christianity, I was struck by its essential unity, which, in spite of its divisions, it has never lost. I trembled on recognizing the same unmistakable aroma coming from the writings of Dante and Bunyan, Thomas Aquinas and William Law. -- C.s. Lewis
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Silenus or Nymphs and -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong, or stark, or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future.4 That's the sort of thing he cares about. The -- C.s. Lewis
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Suffering is not good in itself. What is good in any painful experience is, for the sufferer, his submission to the will of God, and, for the spectators, the compassion aroused and the acts of mercy to which it leads. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now sir, said the bulldog in his business-like way. 'Are you a animal, vegetable, or mineral?'
- The Magician's Nephew -- C.s. Lewis
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It's not what I thought it would be, but it's alright, too. -- High King Peter in Prince Caspian, written by C.S. Lewis -- C.s. Lewis
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Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before. -- C.s. Lewis
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We may not be able to get certainty, but we can get probability, and half a loaf is better than no bread. -- C.s. Lewis
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This lasted longer than I could describe even if I wrote pages and pages about it. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do not dare not to dare. -- C.s. Lewis
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'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.' -- C.s. Lewis
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Agnostics talk cheerfully of man's search for God but they might as well talk about the mouse's search for the cat. -- C.s. Lewis
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Grief. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal. -- C.s. Lewis
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Faith is the art of holding on to things in spite of your changing moods and circumstances. -- C.s. Lewis
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Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods. -- C.s. Lewis
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To live in a fully predictable world is not to be a man. -- C.s. Lewis
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Clearly one must read every good book at least once every ten years. -- C.s. Lewis
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In order to pronounce a book bad it is not enough to discover that it elicits no good response from ourselves, for that might be our fault. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books. -- C.s. Lewis
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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest. -- C.s. Lewis
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... Of his sins [Heavenly Father] does not want [man] to think [on them] too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better [Heavenly Father] is pleased. -- C.s. Lewis
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No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice. -- C.s. Lewis
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This new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think God wants us to love Him more, not to love others less. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who would most scornfully repudiate Christianity as a mere "opiate of the people" have a contempt for the rich, that is, for all mankind except the poor. -- C.s. Lewis
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The bolt of Tash falls from above!'
'Does it ever get caught on a hook halfway? -- C.s. Lewis
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The difference between the old and the new education being) in a word, the old was a kind of propagation - men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love, while always forgiving of imperfections and mistakes, can never cease to will their removal. -- C.s. Lewis
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I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now. -- C.s. Lewis
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Jaweh is clearly not a Nature-God. He does not die and come to life each year as a true Corn-king should. He may give wine and fertility, but must not be worshipped with Bacchanalian or aphrodisiac rites. -- C.s. Lewis
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This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal. -- C.s. Lewis
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The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. -- C.s. Lewis
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The number of things he thought of saying all at once nearly suffocated him. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is always the novice who exaggerates. -- C.s. Lewis
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Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience. -- C.s. Lewis
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Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world's end. -- C.s. Lewis
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When Jill woke next morning and found herself in a cave, she thought for one horrid moment that she was back in the Underworld. -- C.s. Lewis
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The change which the writing wrought in me (and of which I did not write) was only a beginning; only to prepare me for the gods' surgery. They used my own pen to probe my wound. -- C.s. Lewis
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The word 'human' refers to something more than the bodily form or even the rational mind. It refers also to that community of blood and experience which unites all men and women on the Earth. -- C.s. Lewis
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They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to keep it. The cleverer ones were quite sure by now that at least some of the noises which came out of his mouth had a meaning. They christened him Brandy because he made that noise so often. -- C.s. Lewis
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By the way, don't 'weep inwardly' and get a sore throat. If you must weep, weep: a good honest howl! I suspect we - and especially, my sex - don't cry enough now-a-days. Aeneas and Hector and Beowulf, Roland and Lancelot blubbered like schoolgirls, so why shouldn't we? -- C.s. Lewis
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Yes," said the Lord Digory. "Its inside is bigger than its outside. -- C.s. Lewis
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But I want her, I must have her, I shall die if I do not get her - false, proud, black-hearted daughter of a dog that she is! I cannot sleep and my food has no savor and my eyes are darkened because of her beauty. I must have the barbarian queen. -- C.s. Lewis
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Prince Caspian lived in a great castle in the center of Narnia with his uncle, Miraz, the King of Narnia, and his aunt, who had red hair and was called Queen Prunaprismia. -- C.s. Lewis
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I would prefer to battle the 'I'm special' feeling not by the thought, 'I'm no more special than anyone else,' by by the feeling, 'Everyone is as special as me.' -- C.s. Lewis
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The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys. -- C.s. Lewis
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Selfishness has never been admired. -- C.s. Lewis
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We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves ... We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own ... We demand windows. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose. -- C.s. Lewis
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The most blessed result of prayer would be to rise thinking "But I never knew before. I never dreamed ... " I suppose it was at such a moment that Thomas Aquinas said of all his own theology, "It reminds me of straw. -- C.s. Lewis
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The doors of hell are locked from the inside! -- C.s. Lewis
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We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination. -- C.s. Lewis
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The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths
but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path. -- C.s. Lewis
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I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christians never say goodbye! -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone reads, everyone hears things discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones
bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. -- C.s. Lewis
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What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant. -- C.s. Lewis
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But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees -- C.s. Lewis
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For his mind was full of forlorn hopes, death-or-glory charges, and last stands. -- C.s. Lewis
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God has infinite attention, infinite leisure to spare for each one of us. He doesn't have to take us in the line. You're as much alone with Him as if you were the only thing He'd ever created. -- C.s. Lewis
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In your life you meet people. Some you never think about again. Some, you wonder what happened to them. There are some that you wonder if they ever think about you. And then there are some that you wish you never have to think about again. But you do. -- C.s. Lewis
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True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. -- C.s. Lewis
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I'm a beast, I am, and a Badger what's more. We don't change. We hold on. -- C.s. Lewis
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With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis. -- C.s. Lewis
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Well. You have a secret from me," he said in the end. "No, don't turn away from me. Did you think I would try to press or conjure it out of you? Never that. Friends must be free. My tormenting you to find it would build a worse barrier between us than your hiding it. -- C.s. Lewis
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I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is dull, Son of Adam, to drink without eating," said the Queen presently. "What would you like best to eat?"
"Turkish Delight, please, your Majesty," said Edmund. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn. -- C.s. Lewis
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The thing is to rely on God. The time will come when you will regard all this misery as a small price to pay for having been brought to that dependence. Meanwhile, the trouble is that relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing has yet been done. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do I think well of myself, think myself a nice chap? WEll, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst moments) ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness. -- C.s. Lewis
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Just as there are none good but God, and nothing good but goodness, so there are no loves but love its self, the very love; and that what I call the other unnatural loves, are not loves at all in their own right but become so only so far as they participate in the very love. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is an old story and if you want to go into it you will no doubt consult people who have more authority to talk about it than I have. All I am doing is to ask people to face the facts - to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer. -- C.s. Lewis
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I had rather that the human race, having a certain quality in their lives, should continue for only a few centuries than that, losing freedom, friendship, dignity, and mercy, and learning to be quite content without them, they should continue for millions of millennia. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one. -- C.s. Lewis
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Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats. -- C.s. Lewis
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You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make. -- C.s. Lewis
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Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one
the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts, ... Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape. -- C.s. Lewis
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But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it is also dreadful? -- C.s. Lewis
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If flesh and blood cannot inherit the Kingdom, that is not because they are too solid, too gross, too distinct, too "illustrious with being." They are too flimsy, too transitory, too phantasmal. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't say it was delightful; make us say delightful when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers Please will you do the job for me. -- C.s. Lewis
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When he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying 'Oh Lord, make me chaste,' his heart had been secretly adding, 'But please don't do it just yet. -- C.s. Lewis
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But that would be putting the clock back," gasped the Governor. "Have you no idea of progress, of development?"
"I have seen them both in an egg," said Caspian. "We call it Going bad in Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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Can you lay your hand on your hearts and tell me I'm really alive? Are you sure I wasn't drowned and we're not all ghosts together? -- C.s. Lewis
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[Aslan said,] Well done, last of the Kings of Narnia, who stood firm at the darkest hour. -- C.s. Lewis
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People who have not been in Narnia sometimes think that a thing cannot be good and terrible at the same time. -- C.s. Lewis
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We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human. -- C.s. Lewis
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That's all right," said Edmund. "Between ourselves, you haven't been as bad as I was on my first trip to Narnia. You were only an ass, but I was a traitor. -- C.s. Lewis
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Let us go on and take the adventures that shall fall to us. -- C.s. Lewis
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They did nothing wrong their time here has ended -- C.s. Lewis
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But who is Aslan? Do you know him?"
"Well-he knows me," said Edmund. "He is the great Lion, the son of the Emperor-beyond-the-Sea, who saved me and saved Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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The truth is, he was so glad at being free from his long enchantment that all dangers seemed a game in comparison. But the rest found it an eerie journey. -- C.s. Lewis
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That one small noise brought back the old days to the children's minds more than anything that had happened yet. All the battles and hunts and feasts came rushing into their heads together. -- C.s. Lewis
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Laugh and fear not, creatures. Now that you are no longer dumb and witless, you need not always be grave. For jokes as well as justice come in with speech. -- C.s. Lewis
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for those who come so far. Some call this island the World's End, for though you can sail further, this is the beginning of the end. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hail, Aslan. We hear ans obey. We are awake. We love. We think. We speak. We know. -- C.s. Lewis
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They were making a riotous noise, but it was much more like music - rather advanced music which you don't quite take in at the first hearing - than birds' songs ever are in our world. -- C.s. Lewis
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For Narnia and for Aslan! -- C.s. Lewis
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That world is ended, as if it had never been. Let the race of Adam and Eve take warning. -- C.s. Lewis
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Last year, when he had been staying with the Pevensies, he had managed to hear them all talking of Narnia and he loved teasing them about it. He thought of course that they were making it all up; and as he was far too stupid to make anything up himself, he did not approve of that. -- C.s. Lewis
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Puddleglum!" said Jill. "You're a regular old humbug. You sound as doleful as a funeral and I believe you're perfectly happy. And you talk as if you were afraid of everything, when you're really as brave as - as a lion. -- C.s. Lewis
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Welcome, Prince,' said Aslan. 'Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?'
I - I don't think I do, Sir,' said Caspian. 'I am only a kid.'
Good,' said Aslan. 'If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been proof that you were not. -- C.s. Lewis
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You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.
- Narnia -- C.s. Lewis
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Most of us, I suppose, have a secret country but for most of us it is only an imaginary country. Edmund and Lucy were luckier than other people in that respect. -- C.s. Lewis
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This is the reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little you might come to know me better there".
-Aslan, Voyage of the Dawn Treader -- C.s. Lewis
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You have a traitor there, Aslan, said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he'd been through and after the talk he'd had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn't seem to matter what the Witch said. -- C.s. Lewis
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And now, haste, haste, haste. -- C.s. Lewis
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Remember that all worlds draw to an end and that noble death is a treasure which no one is too poor to buy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those are the big mountains between Archenland and Narnia. I must have come through the pass in the night. What luck that I hit it!
at least, it wasn't luck at all, really. It was Him! And now, I'm in Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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Things never happen the same way twice. -- C.s. Lewis
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Got to start by finding it, have we?" answered Puddleglum. " Not allowed to start by looking for it, I suppose? -- C.s. Lewis
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Onward and Upward! To Narnia and the North! -- C.s. Lewis
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Peter, High King of Narnia," said Aslan. "Shut the Door. -- C.s. Lewis
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What do they teach them at these schools? -- C.s. Lewis
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This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea. -- C.s. Lewis
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But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan. -- C.s. Lewis
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She was nearly fainting: indeed, she wished she could really faint, but faints don't come for the asking. -- C.s. Lewis
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That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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Yes, of course you'll get back to Narnia again some day. Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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and I don't think we can do anything for him. It only makes him worse if you try to be nice to him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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Though under earth, and throneless now I be
Yet while I lived all earth was under me. -- C.s. Lewis
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This was bad grammar of course, but that is how beavers talk when they are excited; I mean, in Narnia
in our world they usually don't talk at all.
- The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe -- C.s. Lewis
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No people find each other more absurd than lovers -- C.s. Lewis
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Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. -- C.s. Lewis
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A creature who has kept a planet in its orbit for several billions of years will be able to manage a packing case! -- C.s. Lewis
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The adventure was too high, its circumstance too solemn, for any emotion save a severe delight. pg. 31 -- C.s. Lewis
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What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist? -- C.s. Lewis
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It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows-the only food that any possible universe ever can grow-then we must starve eternally. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ungit tells me things. I hear of terrible doings in this land, mortals aping the gods and stealing the worship due -- C.s. Lewis
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Gratitude exclaims, very properly, 'How good of God to give me this.' -- C.s. Lewis
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The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time
for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. -- C.s. Lewis
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I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me. -- C.s. Lewis
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Autumn is really the best of the seasons -- C.s. Lewis
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Bemused and besotted as we are, we still dimly know at heart that nothing which is at all times and in every way agreeable to us can have objective reality. It is of the very nature of the real that it should have sharp corners and rough edges, that it should be resistant, should be itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear. -- C.s. Lewis
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Here are beauties which pierce like swords or burn like cold iron. Here is a book which will break your heart. [on Lord of the Rings] -- C.s. Lewis
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They tell me, Lord, that when I seem
To be in speech with you.
Since but one voice is heard, it -- C.s. Lewis
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Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't just go on being a good egg. You must either hatch or go bad! -- C.s. Lewis
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You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me. -- C.s. Lewis
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Let the thrill go - let it die away - go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow - and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. -- C.s. Lewis
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that is just why a vague religion - all about feeling God in nature, and so on - is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work: -- C.s. Lewis
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The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen? -- C.s. Lewis
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If 'All'
quite seriously all
'for love' is implicit in the Beloved's attitude, his or her love is not worth having. It is not related in the right way to Love Himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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The whole thing became a matter of speculation: I was soon (in the famous words) "altering 'I believe' to 'one does feel.' " And oh, the relief of it! -- C.s. Lewis
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Glory be!' said the Cabby. 'I'd ha' been a better man all my life if I'd known there were things like this. -- C.s. Lewis
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As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul. -- C.s. Lewis
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I hid all the things I was feeling
and indeed I did not know what they were, except that all the peace of that autumnal journey was gone -- C.s. Lewis
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Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches. -- C.s. Lewis
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It would have been a depressing place on a wet evening. Seen under a morning sun, with a fresh wind blowing, and the air filled with the crying of birds, there was something fine and fresh and clean about its loneliness. The children felt their spirits rise. -- C.s. Lewis
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Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows. But will you come? -- C.s. Lewis
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I have always at least, ever since I can remember had a kind of longing for death. -- C.s. Lewis
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That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. -- C.s. Lewis
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You keep a grip of my heels, Pole, and Scrubb would hold on to yours. The we'll all be comfortable. -- C.s. Lewis
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The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual. -- C.s. Lewis
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It was likely, then that this - -this stumbling walk on a wet night across a ploughed field- - meant death. Death - -the thing one had always heard of (like love), the thing the poets had written about. So this was how it was going to be. But that was not the main point. -- C.s. Lewis
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Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables. -- C.s. Lewis
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It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun. -- C.s. Lewis
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Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Am I to understand,' said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, 'That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty's protection? Because, if not
-- C.s. Lewis
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My friendship you shall have, leanred Man," piped Reepicheep. "And any Dwarf
or Giant
in the army who does not give you good language shall have my sword to reckon with. -- C.s. Lewis
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Giant Wimbleweather burst into one of those not very intelligent laughs to which the nicer sort of Giants are so liable. He checked himself at once and looked as grace as a turnip by the time Reepicheep discovered where the noise came from. -- C.s. Lewis
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His name was Reepicheep and he was a gay and martial mouse. He wore a tiny little rapier at his side and twirled his long whiskers as if they were a moustache. -- C.s. Lewis
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Where sky and water meet,
Where the waves grow sweet,
Doubt not, Reepicheep,
To find all you seek, There is the utter East. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am not sure that the best way to make a boy love the English poets might not be forbid him to read them and then make sure that he had plenty of opportunities to disobey you. -- C.s. Lewis
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One road leads home and a thousand roads lead into the wilderness. -- C.s. Lewis
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Are the gods not just?"
"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? -- C.s. Lewis
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In her also I found what I liked best - an unfailing, kindly welcome without a hint of sentimentality, unruffled good sense, the unobtrusive talent for making all things at all times as cheerful and comfortable as circumstances allowed. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavourable. Favourable conditions never come. -- C.s. Lewis
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To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself? -- C.s. Lewis
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Isn't it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back everything is different? -- C.s. Lewis
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Weston did not know the Malacandrian word for laugh: indeed, it was not a word he understood very well in any language. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends - comrades - do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed ... -- C.s. Lewis
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If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method. -- C.s. Lewis
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To this day the vision of the world which comes most naturally to me is one in which "we two" or "we few" (and in a sense "we happy few") stand together against something stronger and larger. -- C.s. Lewis
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they propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds. -- C.s. Lewis
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My father, whom I implicitly believed, represented adult life as one of incessant drudgery under the continual threat of financial ruin. -- C.s. Lewis
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Because God created the Natural - invented it out of His love and artistry - it demands our reverence. -- C.s. Lewis
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A perception of this truth lies at the back of the universal human feeling that bad men ought to suffer. It is no use turning up our noses at this feeling, as if it were wholly base. On its mildest level it appeals to everyone's sense of justice. Once -- C.s. Lewis
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All the things magicians do
Could be done by me and you
Freely, if we only knew. -- C.s. Lewis
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I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like. -- C.s. Lewis
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Meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ' God can'. -- C.s. Lewis
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If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past. -- C.s. Lewis
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it was not even imaginative; it lives in my memory mainly as a period of humdrum, prosaic happiness and awakes none of the poignant nostalgia with which I look back on my much less happy boyhood. It is not settled happiness but momentary joy that glorifies the past. To -- C.s. Lewis
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It is in the process of being worshipped that God communicates His presence to men. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hate obscures all distinctions. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man is now a horror to God and himself and a creature ill-adapted to the universe not because God made him so but because he has made himself so by the abuse of his free will. -- C.s. Lewis
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Evil comes from the ABUSE of free will -- C.s. Lewis
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The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back to a lesson that it wants to shirk. -- C.s. Lewis
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If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit. -- C.s. Lewis
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Wouldn't it be dreadful if some day in our own world, at home, men start going wild inside, like the animals here, and still look like men, so that you'd never know which were which. -- C.s. Lewis
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More than once in the days that followed [Eustace] attempted to write it for them on the sand. But this never succeeded. In the first place Eustace (never having read the right books) had no idea how to tell a story straight. -- C.s. Lewis
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The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph. -- C.s. Lewis
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Then it was you who wounded Aravis?"
"It was I."
"But what for?"
"Child," said the Voice, "I am telling you your story, not hers. I tell no one any story but his own. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Divine Nature wounds and perhaps destroys us merely by being what it is. -- C.s. Lewis
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Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available. -- C.s. Lewis
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The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is a liar and cannot keep a secret and ought not to be trusted: but when he finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge -- C.s. Lewis
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Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art. -- C.s. Lewis
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We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him ... -- C.s. Lewis
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And you must always remember there's one good thing about being trapped down here: it'll save funeral expenses. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must remember that the soul is but a hollow which God fills. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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To generalize is to be an idiot, said Blake. Perhaps he went too far. But to generalize is to be a finite mind. Generalities are the lenses with which our intellects have to manage. -- C.s. Lewis
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What was myth in one world might always be fact in some other. -- C.s. Lewis
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The process of growing up is to be valued for what we gain, not for what we lose. -- C.s. Lewis
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By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? -- C.s. Lewis
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When we are such as He can love without impediment, we shall in fact be happy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Fun is closely related to Joy
a sort of emotional froth arising from the play of instinct. -- C.s. Lewis
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A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we are wholly His we will be more ourselves than ever. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him. We must not use the Bible as a sort of encyclopedia out of which texts can be taken for use as weapons. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't get second things by putting them first. You get second things only by putting first things first. -- C.s. Lewis
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The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter? -- C.s. Lewis
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The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not. -- C.s. Lewis
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Believe in God like you believe in the sunrise. Not because you can see it, but because you can see all it touches. -- C.s. Lewis
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All things (e.g. a camel's journey through
A needle's eye) are possible, it's true.
But picture how the camel feels, squeezed out
In one long bloody thread, from tail to snout. -- C.s. Lewis
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The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven. -- C.s. Lewis
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The great art of life is to moderate our passions. Objects of affection are like other belongings. We must love them enough to enrich our lives while we have them, not enough to impoverish our lives when they are gone. -- C.s. Lewis
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Enjoy it well. Strengthen the feebler, lighten the darker, love all. Hail and be glad. -- C.s. Lewis
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You people have no imagination! -- C.s. Lewis
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True wisdom is the skill and practice of death. -- C.s. Lewis
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No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city. -- C.s. Lewis
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God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only an obstinate prejudice about this period (which I will presently try to account for) could blind us to a certain change which comes over the merely literary texts as we pass from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man. We -- C.s. Lewis
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If you have a religion it must be cosmic. -- C.s. Lewis
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Come and help to carry the tray down and we'll have breakfast. What a mercy I thought of bringing the breadknife. -- C.s. Lewis
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When Adam ate the irrevocable apple, Thou
Saw'st beyond death the resurrection of the dead -- C.s. Lewis
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The most important events in every age never reach the history books. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am so coarse, the things the poets see
Are obstinately invisible to me -- C.s. Lewis
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Unsatisfied desire is in itself more desirable than any other satisfaction. -- C.s. Lewis
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A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping. -- C.s. Lewis
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They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In -- C.s. Lewis
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All times may be soon to Aslan; but in my home all hungry times are one o'clock. -- C.s. Lewis
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For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself. -- C.s. Lewis
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We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. -- C.s. Lewis
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All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart? -- C.s. Lewis
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Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. And -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing will shake a man-or at any rate a man like me-out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ah, you've come over the water. Powerful wet stuff, ain't it? -- C.s. Lewis
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... the greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a very few things well before he is twenty, and when we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects, we destroy his standards, perhaps for life. -- C.s. Lewis
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In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms - into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen. -- C.s. Lewis
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They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined? -- C.s. Lewis
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The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling. -- C.s. Lewis
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Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling ... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Prayer that precedes all other prayer is, may the real me meet the real you. -- C.s. Lewis
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that. -- C.s. Lewis
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If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention? -- C.s. Lewis
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At that moment he was unconscious of everything except his fear. He did not even know what he was afraid of: the fear itself possessed his whole mind, a formless, infinite misgiving. pg. 25 -- C.s. Lewis
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In silence and in meditation on the eternal truths, I hear the voice of God which excites our hearts to greater love. -- C.s. Lewis
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He had eaten his share of the dinner, but he hadn't really enjoyed it because he was thinking all the time about Turkish Delight - and there's nothing that spoils the taste of good ordinary food half so much as the memory of bad magic food. -- C.s. Lewis
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Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead. -- C.s. Lewis
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If anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service
with my sword
whenever he has leisure. -- C.s. Lewis
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Who are you?'
One who has waited long for you to speak. -- C.s. Lewis
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Cobbles and kettledrums! ... I hope this madness isn't going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the lesson of it all is, your Highness," said the oldest Dwarf, "that those Northern Witches always mean the same thing, but in every age they have a different plan for getting it. -- C.s. Lewis
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That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never can carry a map in their heads."
"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy. -- C.s. Lewis
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The stars never lie, but Men and Beasts do. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable. -- C.s. Lewis
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Daughter of Eve from the far land of Spare Oom where eternal summer reigns around the bright city of War Drobe, how would it be if you came and had tea with me? -- C.s. Lewis
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When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hypersomatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting. -- C.s. Lewis
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Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses. -- C.s. Lewis
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One always feel better when one has made up one's mind. -- C.s. Lewis
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Time is the very lens through which ye see
small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope
something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you have realised that our position is nearly desperate you will begin to understand what the Christians are talking about. -- C.s. Lewis
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All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue; but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse. -- C.s. Lewis
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So many things have now become interesting to me because at first I had to do them whether I liked them or not, and thus one is kicked into conquering new countries where one is afterwards at home. -- C.s. Lewis
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This is my password," said the King as he drew his sword. "The light is dawning, the lie broken. Now guard thee, miscreant, for I am Tirian of Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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And he had been very badly treated by a girl too. He had thought her a really civilised and adult personality, and then she had unexpectedly revealed that she was a mass of bourgeois prejudices and monogamic instincts. -- C.s. Lewis
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Emerson has said, "When half-gods go, the gods arrive." That is a very doubtful maxim. Better say, "When God arrives (and only then) the half-gods can remain." Left to themselves they either vanish or become demons. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Gone! And you and I quite crestfallen. It's always like that, you can't keep him; it's not as if he were a tame lion. -- C.s. Lewis
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I didn't go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don't recommend Christianity. -- C.s. Lewis
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Forget your pride (what have you to be proud of?) and forget your anger (who has done you wrong?) and accept the mercy of these good kings. -- C.s. Lewis
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He'll be coming and going" he had said. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down
and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you take nature as a teacher she will teach you exactly the lessons you had already decided to learn; this is only another way of saying that nature does not teach. -- C.s. Lewis
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The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are. -- C.s. Lewis
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The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry. -- C.s. Lewis
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Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even in this world of course it is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes - I mean Amen,' said Ransom, and hurled the stone as hard as he could into the Un-man's face. -- C.s. Lewis
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On the rebound one passes into tears and pathos. Maudlin tears. I almost prefer the moments of agony. These are at least clean and honest. But the bath of self-pity, the wallow, the loathsome sticky-sweet pleasure of indulging it
that disgusts me -- C.s. Lewis
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Why love if losing hurts so much? We love to know that we are not alone. -- C.s. Lewis
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Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both. -- C.s. Lewis
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The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive. -- C.s. Lewis
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No, Digory. Men like me, who possess hidden wisdom, are freed from common rules just as we are cut off from common pleasures. Ours, my boy, is a high and lonely destiny. -- C.s. Lewis
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I was allowed to play at philosophy no longer. -- C.s. Lewis
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I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? -- C.s. Lewis
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That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Let's pray that the human race never escapes Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable. -- C.s. Lewis
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Looking for God-or Heaven-by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Hence it is invaluable as a means of destroying shame. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have seen landscapes ... which, under a particular light, made me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge. Nature has that in her which compels us to invent giants: and only giants will do. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must get over wanting to be needed. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment ... is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can't provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities. -- C.s. Lewis
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That's all YOU know,' said Digory. 'It's because you're a girl. Girls never want to know anything but gossip and rot about people getting engaged. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him -- C.s. Lewis
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Do you know what it is? There's one part love in your heart, and five parts anger, and seven parts pride. -- C.s. Lewis
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He would have been horribly compelled to feel this Earth not as the bottom of a universe but as a ball spinning, and rolling onwards, both at delirious speed, and not through emptiness but through some densely inhabited and intricately structured medium. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we insist on keeping Hell (or even earth) we shall not see Heaven: if we accept Heaven we shall not be able to retain even the smallest and most intimate souvenirs of Hell. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace. -- C.s. Lewis
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I felt sure that [Oyarsa] was what we call "good," but I wasn't sure whether I liked "goodness" so much as I had supposed. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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But as long as you know you're nobody special, you'll be a very decent sort of Horse, on the whole, and taking one thing with another. -- C.s. Lewis
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To please God ... to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness ... to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. -- C.s. Lewis
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Is any pleasure on Earth as great as a circle of Christian friends? -- C.s. Lewis
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I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world for your own amusement. -- C.s. Lewis
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I discovered that the wisdom of the world, and a great deal of its folly also, is to be found in the pages of books. And -- C.s. Lewis
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For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays. -- C.s. Lewis
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The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal. -- C.s. Lewis
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we must all be guarded by equal rights from one another's greed, because we are fallen. -- C.s. Lewis
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who can describe beauty? The reader may smile at this as the far-off echo of a precocious calf love, but he will be wrong. There are beauties so unambiguous that they need no lens of that kind to reveal them; they are visible even to the careless and objective eyes of a child. -- C.s. Lewis
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May it please your High Majesty," said the second Mouse, whose name was Peepiceek, "we are all waiting to cut off our own tails if our Chief must go without his. We will not bear the shame of wearing an honor which is denied to the High Mouse. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from. He is our only possible ally, and we have made ourselves His enemies. -- C.s. Lewis
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No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful. Luckily -- C.s. Lewis
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Good characters in fiction are the very devil. Not only because most authors have too little material to make them of, but because we as readers have a strong subconscious wish to find them incredible. -- C.s. Lewis
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Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them. -- C.s. Lewis
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The human qualities of the raw materials show through. Naivety, error, contradiction, even (as in the cursing Psalms) wickedness are not removed. The total result is not "the Word of God" in the sense that every passage in itself, gives impeccable science or history. It carries the Word of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is so fatally easy to confuse an aesthetic appreciation of the spiritual life with the life itself-to dream that you have waked, washed, and dressed and then to find yourself still in bed. -- C.s. Lewis
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The madrigore of verjuice must be talthibianised. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our research department has not yet discovered (though success is hourly expected) how to produce any virtue. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than the doctrine of hell, if it lay in my power. But it has the support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord's own words; it has always been held by the Christian Church, and it has the support of reason. -- C.s. Lewis
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Such, then, was my position: to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail, and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service. -- C.s. Lewis
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The absent are easily refuted. -- C.s. Lewis
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You Too? I thought I was the only one. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. -- C.s. Lewis
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Disobedience to conscience makes conscience blind. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written. -- C.s. Lewis
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One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Listen!' said the White Spirit. 'Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now.' 'Ah, -- C.s. Lewis
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Above all else , the devil can not stand to be mocked. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one. -- C.s. Lewis
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The New Testament does not envisage solitary religion; regular assembly for worship is everywhere in the epistles. -- C.s. Lewis
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The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth
the very thing the whole story has been about. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither. -- C.s. Lewis
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The first fact in the history of Christendom is a number of people who say they have seen the Resurrection. -- C.s. Lewis
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[The witch] would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backwards. -- C.s. Lewis
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When a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and Death itself would start working backward. -- C.s. Lewis
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If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.' -- C.s. Lewis
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You remember that wonderful phrase, how Queen Morgan 'set all the country on fire with ladies that were enchantresses. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love is unselfishly choosing for another's highest good. -- C.s. Lewis
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Can you not see death as the friend and deliverer? It means stripping off that body which is tormenting you. What are you afraid of? Has this world been so kind to you that you should leave it with regret? -- C.s. Lewis
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So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or 'science' or psychology, or what not. Real -- C.s. Lewis
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The happiness which God designs for his higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to him. -- C.s. Lewis
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When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better. -- C.s. Lewis
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God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. -- C.s. Lewis
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We have not long to live in any event. Let us spend what is left in seeking the unpeopled world behind the sunrise. -- C.s. Lewis
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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 a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all. -- C.s. Lewis
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It was necessary, and the necessary was always possible. -- C.s. Lewis
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I did wonder if there really was such a person as Aslan: but then sometimes I wondered if there were really people like you. Yet there you are. -- C.s. Lewis
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True friends don't spend time gazing into each other's eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction - toward common projects, goals - above all, towards a common Lord. -- C.s. Lewis
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We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust. -- C.s. Lewis
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A whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow's end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present. -- C.s. Lewis
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He'll be coming and going. One day you'll see him and another you won't. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everything is as good or bad as our opinion makes it. -- C.s. Lewis
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I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God;and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship is ... the sort of love one can
imagine between angels ... -- C.s. Lewis
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For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense. -- C.s. Lewis
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... the possibility of pain is inherent in the very existence of a world where souls can meet. -- C.s. Lewis
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I had at least loved Psyche truly. There, if nowhere else, I had the right of it and the gods were in the wrong. -- C.s. Lewis
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Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, Do you care about the same truth? -- C.s. Lewis
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We are all receiving Charity. There is something in each of us that cannot be
naturally loved. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man's love for a woman is not mercenary because he wants to marry her, nor his love for poetry mercenary because he wants to read it, nor his love of exercise less disinterested because he wants to run and leap and walk. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. -- C.s. Lewis
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He (God) loved us not because we are lovable, but because He is love. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried. -- C.s. Lewis
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I cannot love a lie," said the Lady. "I cannot love the thing which is not. I am in Love, and out of it I will not go. -- C.s. Lewis
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When pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love is the great conqueror of lust. -- C.s. Lewis
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The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not. -- C.s. Lewis
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Bereavement is not the truncation of married love, but one of its regular phases---like the honeymoon. What we want is to live our marriage well and faithfully through that phase too. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the midst of a world of light and love, of song and feast and dance, [Lucifer] could find nothing to think of more interesting than his own prestige. -- C.s. Lewis
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I came alive when I started loving you. -- C.s. Lewis
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If there is equality it is in His love, not in us. -- C.s. Lewis
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My love for Bardia (not Bardia himself) had become to me a sickening thing. I had been dragged up and out onto such heights and precipices of truth, that I came into an air where it could not live. It stank; a gnawing greed for one to whom I could give nothing, of whom I craved all. -- C.s. Lewis
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We love and reason because God Loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power -- C.s. Lewis
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But I was wrong to weep and beg and try to force you by your love. Love is not a thing to be so used. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you love deeply, you're going to get hurt badly. But it's still worth it. -- C.s. Lewis
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When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand. -- C.s. Lewis
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What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you ... We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly. -- C.s. Lewis
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This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted. -- C.s. Lewis
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For the greater the love the greater the grief, and the stronger the faith the more savagely will Satan storm its fortress. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do love that tune - but really, I must go home. I only meant to stay for a few minutes. -- C.s. Lewis
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Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives. -- C.s. Lewis
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But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Be weird. Be random. Be who you are. Because you never know who would love the person you hide. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that? -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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He loved us not because we were lovable, but because He is love. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is love, and that love works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship is the happiest and most fully human of all loves, the crown of life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Strengthen the feebler, lighten the darker, love all. -- C.s. Lewis
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You cannot love a fellow creature fully till you love God. -- C.s. Lewis
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To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin -- C.s. Lewis
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No net less wide than a man's whole heart, nor less fine of mesh than love, will hold the sacred Fish. -- C.s. Lewis
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If all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state. -- C.s. Lewis
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God's love is not wearied by our sins & is relentless in its determination that we be cured at whatever cost to us or Him -- C.s. Lewis
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Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell. -- C.s. Lewis
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love is never wasted, for its value does not rest upon reciprocity. -- C.s. Lewis
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God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. -- C.s. Lewis
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Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater. -- C.s. Lewis
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What people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean 'Love is God. -- C.s. Lewis
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When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also - I must put it crudely - good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only place in all of the world where you can escape the dangers of love is hell. -- C.s. Lewis
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If Affection is made the absolute sovereign of a human life the seeds will germinate. Love, having become a god, becomes a demon. -- C.s. Lewis
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Turn God's wrath into mere enlightened disapproval, and you also turn His love into mere humanitarianism. -- C.s. Lewis
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To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, nor from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are bidden to 'put on Christ', to become like God. That is, whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. -- C.s. Lewis
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Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still. -- C.s. Lewis
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Anger is the fluid that love bleeds when it gets cut. -- C.s. Lewis
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It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery. -- C.s. Lewis
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In God there is no hunger that needs to be filled, only plenteousness that desires to give. -- C.s. Lewis
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C. S. Lewis, who was once described by a friend as a man in love with the imagination, believed that a complacent acceptance of the status quo reflects more than a failure of nerve. -- C.s. Lewis
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Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other. -- C.s. Lewis
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It has actually become very necessary in our time to rebut the theory that every firm and serious friendship is really homosexual. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hence as the poet says: People in love cannot be moved by kindness, And opposition makes them feel like martyrs. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people. -- C.s. Lewis
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Praise is the mode of love which always has some element of joy in it. -- C.s. Lewis
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To love at all is to be vulnerable. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love is more than an emotion, it is a decision. -- C.s. Lewis
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To love is to be vulnerable ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Liking an author may be as involuntary and improbable as falling in love. -- C.s. Lewis
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The living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience. -- C.s. Lewis
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Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs? -- C.s. Lewis
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We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues - like the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his 'bad days' and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I -- C.s. Lewis
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Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now Eros makes a man really want, not a woman, but one particular woman. In some mysterious but quite indisputable fashion the lover desires the Beloved herself, not the pleasure she can give. -- C.s. Lewis
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You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him. -- C.s. Lewis
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But the truth is God has not told us His arrangement about the other people are. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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More probably, foolish preachers, by always telling you how much Christianity will help you and how good it is for society, have actually led you to forget that Christianity is not a patent medicine. Christianity -- C.s. Lewis
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The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life
the life God is sending one day by day. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it. -- C.s. Lewis
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We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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In all discussions of Hell we should keep steadily before our eyes the possible damnation, not of our enemies nor our friends (since both these disturb the reason) but of ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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You won't get eternal life by just feeling the presence of God in flowers or music. -- C.s. Lewis
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You will remember how, as a schoolboy, I had destroyed my religious life by a vicious subjectivism which made 'realizations' the aim of prayer; turning away from God to seek states of mind, and trying to produce those states of mind by 'maistry'. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. -- C.s. Lewis
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Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. -- C.s. Lewis
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You are never too old to set a new goal or to dream a new dream. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of course, there is no conceivable way of getting by reason from the proposition "I am losing interest in this" to the proposition "This is false. -- C.s. Lewis
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Suppose that the earthly lives she and I shared for a few years are in reality only the basis for, or prelude to, or earthly appearance of, two unimaginable, supercosmic, eternal somethings. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you haven't met Satan recently, you are probably going his way! -- C.s. Lewis
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I felt ashamed."
"But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?"
"No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal
of being a mortal."
"But how could you help that?"
"Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help? -- C.s. Lewis
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[Death] is a safety-device because, once Man has fallen, natural immortality would be the one utterly hopeless destiny for him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Be thou glad sleeper and thy sorrow offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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At a well in a yard they met a man who was beating a boy. The stick burst into a flower in the mans hand. He tried to drop it, but it stuck to his hand. His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root. -- C.s. Lewis
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In fighting those who serve devils one always his this on one's side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. they break their tools. -- C.s. Lewis
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A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you. -- C.s. Lewis
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I felt in my bones that this universe does not explain itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. -- C.s. Lewis
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You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage but He is building a palace. He intends to come & live in it Himself -- C.s. Lewis
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Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave -- C.s. Lewis
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We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. -- C.s. Lewis
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Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. -- C.s. Lewis
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Knock and it shall be opened.' But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? -- C.s. Lewis
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The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting -- C.s. Lewis
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No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original
and doesn't notice it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Being nice doesn't make you stupid. It makes you feel good because you know you are gracious enough to forgive and smart enough to realize how distasteful some people can be. -- C.s. Lewis
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You must not do, you must not even try to do, the will of the Father unless you are prepared to 'know of the doctrine'. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whenever you find a man who says he does not believe in a real Right and Wrong, you will find the same man going back on this a moment later. He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining 'It's not fair' before you can say Jack Robinson. -- C.s. Lewis
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At least he went on saying this till Aslan had loaded him up with three dwarfs, one dryad, two rabbits, and a hedgehog, that steadied him a bit. -- C.s. Lewis
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It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it. -- C.s. Lewis
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For most of us the true rivalry lies between the self and the human Other, not yet between the human Other and God. -- C.s. Lewis
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God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain. -- C.s. Lewis
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Make your choice, adventurous Stranger; Strike the bell and bide the danger, Or wonder, till it drives you mad, What would have followed if you had. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, 'Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events. -- C.s. Lewis
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Scripture and tradition habitually put the joys of heaven into the scale against the sufferings of earth, -- C.s. Lewis
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Often, when I pray, I wonder if I'm not posting letters to a non-existent address. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out. -- C.s. Lewis
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Affection would not be affection if it was loudly and frequently expressed; to produce it in public is like getting your household furniture out for a move. It did very well in its place, but it looks shabby or tawdry or grotesque in the sunshine. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hatred obscures all distinctions. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am inclined to think a Christian would be wise to avoid, where he decently can, any meeting with people who are bullies, lascivious, cruel, dishonest, spiteful and so forth. -- C.s. Lewis
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And there we all were, as invisible as you could wish to see. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is someone that I love even though I don't approve of what he does. There is someone I accept though some of his thoughts and actions revolt me. There is someone I forgive though he hurts the people I love the most. That person is ... me. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ah, poor Pole. It's been to much for her, this last bit. Turned her head, I shouldn't wonder. She's beginning to see things. -- C.s. Lewis
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How wicked it would be, if we could, to call the dead back! She said not to me but to the chaplain, 'I am at peace with God.' She smiled, but not at me. Poi si torno all' eterna fontana. -- C.s. Lewis
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You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality inside the individual. -- C.s. Lewis
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A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous. -- C.s. Lewis
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Kids like us don't often have the chance of meeting a great warrior like you. Would you have a little fencing match with me? It would be frightfully decent. -- C.s. Lewis
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No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he IS a fallen man in a fallen world. -- C.s. Lewis
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In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. -- C.s. Lewis
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I gather they are even vaguely pacifist, not on moral grounds but from an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men and from a dash of purely fashionable and literary communism. -- C.s. Lewis
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Mercy detached from justice grows unmerciful. -- C.s. Lewis
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Go and wake the others and tell them to follow. If they will not, then you at least must follow me alone. -- C.s. Lewis
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They call him Aslan in That Place," said Eustace.
"What a curious name!"
"Not half so curious as himself," said Eustace solemnly. -- C.s. Lewis
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The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is because they have no Oyarsa,' said one of the pupils.
It is because everyone of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,' said Augray. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am afraid of the lengths of time, Oyarsa...pg. 123 -- C.s. Lewis
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We were made for God. Only by being in some respect like Him, only by being a manifestation of His beauty, lovingkindness, wisdom or goodness, has any earthly Beloved excited our love. -- C.s. Lewis
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The most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed. -- C.s. Lewis
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What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. -- C.s. Lewis
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If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'. -- C.s. Lewis
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Homemaking is surely in reality the most important work in the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Did Maleldil suggest that our own world might have been saved if the elephant had accidentally trodden on the serpent a moment before Eve was about to yield? -- C.s. Lewis
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The longest way round is the shortest way home.
(Quoting Alexander MacLaren, The Wearied Christ and Other Sermons) -- C.s. Lewis
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A sum can be put right: but only by going back till you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. -- C.s. Lewis
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And as all Christians know there is another way of giving to God; every stranger whom we feed or clothe is Christ. -- C.s. Lewis
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If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back
to be sucked back
into it? -- C.s. Lewis
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Well, if it's the best you can do, I suppose you must -- C.s. Lewis
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Falling in love is something that happens to us, being is love is something we do. No passion is self preservatory. -- C.s. Lewis
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Something of God ... flows into us from the blue of the sky, the taste of honey, the delicious embrace of water whether cold or hot, and even from sleep itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Much is expected from those to whom much is given. -- C.s. Lewis
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Try to remember that the 'bottomless sea' can't hurt us as long as we keep on swimming. -- C.s. Lewis
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Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless. -- C.s. Lewis
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Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species. -- C.s. Lewis
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The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised (1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like -- C.s. Lewis
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When equality is treated ... as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. -- C.s. Lewis
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Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things. -- C.s. Lewis
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[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not. -- C.s. Lewis
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Why must holy places be dark places? -- C.s. Lewis
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Ink is the great cure for all human ills. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago. -- C.s. Lewis
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A clever schoolboy's reaction to his reading is most naturally expressed by parody or imitation. -- C.s. Lewis
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If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable. -- C.s. Lewis
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Straight tribulation is easier to bear than tribulation which advertises itself as pleasure. -- C.s. Lewis
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God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain. -- C.s. Lewis
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To be stories at all they must be a series of events: but it must be understood that this series - the plot, as we call it - is only really a new whereby to catch something else. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have said that she had no face; but that meant she had a thousand faces -- C.s. Lewis
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No photograph can truly recall the beloved's smile. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam
he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. -- C.s. Lewis
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Justice shall be mixed with mercy. You shall not always be an Ass. -- C.s. Lewis
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Got to start by finding it, have we? Can't start by looking for it, I suppose? -- C.s. Lewis
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It's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you meet me here again, you will have come to stay. But not now. You must go back to your own world for a while. -- C.s. Lewis
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Shall I ever be able to read that story again; the one I couldn't remember? Will you tell it to me, Aslan? Oh do,do,do."
"Indeed,yes, I will tell it to you for years and years. But now, come. We must meet the master of this house. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed. -- C.s. Lewis
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And there's one thing about this underground work, we shan't get any rain. -- C.s. Lewis
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You do not see as quite as well as you think. -- C.s. Lewis
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Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself -- C.s. Lewis
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The best is perhaps what we understand the least. -- C.s. Lewis
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The fantastic suggestion that he, Curry, might be a bore passed through his mind so swiftly that a second later he had forgotten it forever. -- C.s. Lewis
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Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger - according to the way you react to it. And we have reacted the wrong way. -- C.s. Lewis
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All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. -- C.s. Lewis
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People talk as if grief were just a feeling
as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman's body. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing can seem extraordinary until you have discovered what is ordinary. Belief in miracles, far from depending on an ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known. -- C.s. Lewis
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Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Golly,' said Edmund under his breath, 'He's a retired star. -- C.s. Lewis
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My aim was to build up more and more that strength, hard and joyless, which had come to me when I heard the god's sentence; by learning, fighting, and labouring, to drive all the woman out of me. -- C.s. Lewis
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How can we meet them face to face, till we have faces? -- C.s. Lewis
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All that is not eternal is eternally out of date. -- C.s. Lewis
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The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel. -- C.s. Lewis
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Suspicion often creates what it suspects. -- C.s. Lewis
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If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note. -- C.s. Lewis
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Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed? -- C.s. Lewis
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Into the void of silence, into the empty space of nothing, the joy of life is unfurled. -- C.s. Lewis
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And so for a time it looked as if all the adventures were coming to and end; but that was not to be. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations. -- C.s. Lewis
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The fundamental laws are in the long run merely statements that every event is itself and not some different event. -- C.s. Lewis
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How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man must endure his going hence. -- C.s. Lewis
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And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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If God had granted all the silly prayers I've made in my life, where should I be now? -- C.s. Lewis
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If this succeeds, he can be induced to live, as I have known many humans live, for quite long periods, two parallel lives; he will not only appear to be, but actually be, a different man in each of the circles he frequents. -- C.s. Lewis
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It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been "had for a sucker" by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need. -- C.s. Lewis
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On the whole, God's love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience. -- C.s. Lewis
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I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. -- C.s. Lewis
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The purpose of all opprobrious language is, not to describe, but to hurt - even when, like Hamlet, we make only the shadow-passes of a soliloquised combat. We call the enemy not what we think he is but what we think he would least like to be called. -- C.s. Lewis
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It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sword glitters not because the swordsman set out to make it glitter but because he is fighting for his life and therefore moving it very quickly. -- C.s. Lewis
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Humour is ... the all-consoling and ... the all-excusing, grace of life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog. -- C.s. Lewis
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And immediately, mixed with a sizzling sound, there came to Shasta a simply delightful smell. It was one he had never smelled in his life before, but I hope you have. It was, in fact, the smell of bacon and eggs and mushrooms all frying in a pan. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one. -- C.s. Lewis
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How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing, it is irresistible -- C.s. Lewis
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We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment. -- C.s. Lewis
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As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism. -- C.s. Lewis
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War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. They thought it good for us to be always aware of our mortality. I am inclined to think they were right. -- C.s. Lewis
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If that (to travel hopefully is better to arrive) were true, and known to be true, how could anyone travel hopefully? There would be nothing to hope for. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't analyze God. He is too awesome, too big, too mysterious, -- C.s. Lewis
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The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Though this situation is extreme, have you ever found yourself in an unexpected place but where, deep down, you knew you were supposed to be? -- C.s. Lewis
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We are arguing like a man who should say, if there were an invisible cat in that empty chair, the chair would look empty; but the chair does look empty; therefore there is an invisible cat in it. -- C.s. Lewis
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No more I do, your Majesty. But what's that got to do with it? I might as well die on a wild goose chase as die here. -- C.s. Lewis
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A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep. -- C.s. Lewis
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If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't. -- C.s. Lewis
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To know what would have happened, child? said Aslan. No. Nobody is ever told that. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is the gods who have been accused. They have answered her. If they in turn accuse her, a greater judge and a more excellent court must try the case. -- C.s. Lewis
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The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. -- C.s. Lewis
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Either Jesus is the Son of God ; or a madman or worse. But His
being just a great teacher? He's not left that open to us. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh, Lor!' said the boy, sitting down on the grassy bank at the edge of the shrubbery and very quickly getting up again because the grass was soaking wet. His name was unfortunately Eustace Scrubb but he wasn't a bad sort. -- C.s. Lewis
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The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbour'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
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Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him. -- C.s. Lewis
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To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't know, you can only believe - or not. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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Where oppression does not completely and permanently break the spirit, has it not a natural tendency to produce retaliatory pride and contempt? -- C.s. Lewis
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But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists - not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer ... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. -- C.s. Lewis
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You invaded Narnia. You have no more right leading than Miraz does.
Peter Pevensie: You, him, your father! Narnia's better off without the lot of you! -- C.s. Lewis
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Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity. -- C.s. Lewis
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Precisely because we cannot predict the moment, we must be ready at all moments. -- C.s. Lewis
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At his most characteristic, medieval man was not a dreamer nor a wanderer. He was an organiser, a codifier, a builder of systems. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are no ordinary people.. it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. -- C.s. Lewis
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Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love. All that was true love in them was, even on earth, far more His than ours, and ours only because His. -- C.s. Lewis
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He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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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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There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't worry. If you really want to, you will Whether you'll like it when you do is another question. -- C.s. Lewis
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The conclusion I dread is not, "So there's no God after all," but, "So this is what God's really like. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh the sweet air in Narnia! An hour's life there is better than a thousand years in Calormen. -- C.s. Lewis
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When man comes into the presence of God he will find, whether he wishes it or not, that all those things which seemed to make him so different from the men of other times, or even from his earlier self, have fallen off. He is back where he always was, where every man always is. -- C.s. Lewis
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The mere presence of a human being, with its offer of at least some companionship, broke down the tension in which his nerves had long been resisting a bottomless dismay. pg. 24 -- C.s. Lewis
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If you become a writer you'll be trying to describe the ?Thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across. -- C.s. Lewis
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True friends ... face in the same direction, toward common projects, interests, goals. -- C.s. Lewis
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God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when He catches us, as it were, off our guard. Our preparations to receive Him sometimes have the opposite effect. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every story of conversion is a story of blessed defeat. -- C.s. Lewis
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Each miracle writes for us in small letters something that God has already written, or will write, in letters almost too large to be noticed, across the whole canvas of Nature. -- C.s. Lewis
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The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own. -- C.s. Lewis
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And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy. -- C.s. Lewis
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The nearest thing we have to a defence against [the gods] (but there is no real defence) is to be very wide awake and sober and hard at work, to hear no music, never to look at earth or sky, and (above all) to love no one. -- C.s. Lewis
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Having mastered our environment, let us now master
ourselves and choose our own destiny. -- C.s. Lewis
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And there's also 'To him that hath shall be given.' After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity. -- C.s. Lewis
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No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods. -- C.s. Lewis
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No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly -- C.s. Lewis
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Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes - like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night
- little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nightmares don't last. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only people who hate escapism are jailers. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
- The Problem of Pain, p. 18 -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction. -- C.s. Lewis
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The very lack of evidence is thus treated as evidence; the absence of smoke proves that the fire is very carefully hidden ... A belief in invisible cats cannot be logically disproved although it does tell us a good deal about those who hold it. -- C.s. Lewis
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The truth is that wherever a man lies with a woman, there, whether they like it or not, a transcendental relation is set up between them which must be eternally enjoyed or eternally endured. -- C.s. Lewis
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The new oligarchy must increasingly rely on the advice of scientists until in the end the politicians become merely the scientists' puppets. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about. -- C.s. Lewis
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The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. -- C.s. Lewis
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Murder! Fascists! Lions! It isn't fair. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the first week of holidays we might acknowledge that term would come again - as a young man, in peacetime, in full health, acknowledges that he will one day die. -- C.s. Lewis
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This point of scientific method merely shows (what no one to my knowledge ever denied) that if miracles did occur, science, as science, could not prove, or disprove, their occurrence. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place? -- C.s. Lewis
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We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who would like the God of scripture to be more purely ethical, do not know what they ask. -- C.s. Lewis
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Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you
almost apart from their meaning
a thrill like music? -- C.s. Lewis
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But when day came, with a sprinkle of rain, and he looked about him and saw on every side an unknown woods, wild heaths, and blue mountain, he thought how large and strange the world was and felt frightened and small. -- C.s. Lewis
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Miracles are for beginners. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now you will have noticed that nothing throws him into a passion so easily as to find a tract of time which he reckoned on having at his own disposal unexpectedly taken from him. -- C.s. Lewis
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It's a terrible thing to have to wake four people, all older than yourself and all very tired, for the purpose of telling them something they probably won't believe and making them do something they certainly won't like. -- C.s. Lewis
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Prostitutes are in no danger of finding their present life so satisfactory that they cannot turn to God: the proud, the avaricious, the self-righteous, are in that danger. -- C.s. Lewis
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Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison. -- C.s. Lewis
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All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man. -- C.s. Lewis
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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, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country. -- C.s. Lewis
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Doubtless, by definition, God was Reason itself. But would he also be "reasonable" [ ... ] -- C.s. Lewis
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Lead us not into temptation' often means, among other things, 'Deny me those gratifying invitations, those highly interesting contacts, that participation in the brilliant movements of our age, which I so often, at such risk, desire.'
Reflections on the Psalms, ch 7 -- C.s. Lewis
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If the universe is so bad ... how on earth did human beings ever come to attribute it to the activity of a wise and good Creator? -- C.s. Lewis
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When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery. -- C.s. Lewis
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I get the idea,' said Mark though with an inward reservation that his present instinctive desire to batter the Professor's face into jelly would take a good deal of destroying. -- C.s. Lewis
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He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden. -- C.s. Lewis
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[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. -- C.s. Lewis
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No doubt Pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. It removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of a rebel soul. -- C.s. Lewis
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Shasta was dreadfully frightened. But it suddenly came into his head, If you funk this, you'll funk every battle all your life. Now or never. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak. We are far too easily pleased. -- C.s. Lewis
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Predestination and freedom were apparently identical. He could no longer see any meaning in the many arguments he had heard on this subject. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't let your happiness depend on something you might lose. -- C.s. Lewis
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And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience. -- C.s. Lewis
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If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality. -- C.s. Lewis
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Am I lost or just less found? -- C.s. Lewis
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See the bear in his own den before you judge of his conditions. -- C.s. Lewis
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The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home. -- C.s. Lewis
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It was from the Lion that the light came. No one ever saw anything more terrible or beautiful. -- C.s. Lewis
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For the rest, all that rises out of the sea of arithmetic is a jungle of dates, battles, exports, imports and the like, forgotten as soon as learned and perfectly useless had they been remembered. -- C.s. Lewis
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The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he 'likes' them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning. -- C.s. Lewis
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Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have any real safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently. -- C.s. Lewis
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One flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends. -- C.s. Lewis
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... To be in time means to change. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't go on "seeing through" things forever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. To "see through" all things is the same as not to see. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is important early in life to acquire the power of reading sense wherever you happen to be. -- C.s. Lewis
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We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full - there's nowhere for Him to put it.' -- C.s. Lewis
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They talked about God. They had no picture in their minds of some mist steaming upward: rather of strong, skillful hands thrust down to make, and mend, perhaps even to destroy. -- C.s. Lewis
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And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job
where the machine seems to run on much as usual
I loath the slightest effort. Not only writing but even reading a letter is too much. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate. -- C.s. Lewis
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One is given strength to bear what happens to one, but not the 100 and 1 different things that might happen. -- C.s. Lewis
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When God becomes a Man and lives as a creature among His own creatures in Palestine, then indeed His life is one of supreme self-sacrifice and leads to Calvary. -- C.s. Lewis
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The humblest praise most, while cranks & malcontents praise least. Praise almost seems to be inner health made audible -- C.s. Lewis
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He did not see at the moment how foolish it was for two of them to go on alone; nor did the King. They were too angry to think clearly. But much evil came of their rashness in the end. Suddenly -- C.s. Lewis
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Delight is incomplete until it is expressed. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think we must attack
wherever we meet it
the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hail Lord, ...Loose my chains. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is very rarely that a middle-aged man finds an author who gives him, what he knew so often in his teens and twenties, the sense of having opened a new door. -- C.s. Lewis
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The enemy will not see you vanish into God's company without an effort to reclaim you. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad. -- C.s. Lewis
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The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.) -- C.s. Lewis
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How should man live save as glass
To let the white light without flame, the Father, pass
Unstained ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come -- C.s. Lewis
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Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning ... -- C.s. Lewis
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A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. -- C.s. Lewis
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The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike ... Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish. -- C.s. Lewis
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That is why I often find myself at such cross-purposes with the modern world: I have been a converted Pagan living among apostate Puritans. -- C.s. Lewis
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The trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges your letters and so in time you come to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got his address wrong. -- C.s. Lewis
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Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. -- C.s. Lewis
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Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse - so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years! -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I should say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends. -- C.s. Lewis
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For, of course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What -- C.s. Lewis
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Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken. -- C.s. Lewis
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If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference. -- C.s. Lewis
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My son, by all means desist from kicking the venerable and enlightened Vizier: for as a costly jewel retains its value even if hidden in a dung-hill, so old age and discretion are to be respected even in the vile persons of our subjects. Desist therefore, and tell us what you desire and propose. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man ... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone. -- C.s. Lewis
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In general the parallel between the popular uses of music and of pictures is close enough. Both consist of 'using' rather than 'receiving'. Both rush hastily forward to do things with the work of art instead of waiting for it to do something to them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe. -- C.s. Lewis
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Maybe it will go away,' said Lucy.
'It'll be worse if it does,' said Edmund, 'because then we shan't know where it is. If there is a wasp in the room I like to be able to see it. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is something awfully nice about reading a book again, with all the half-unconscious memories it brings back. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose. -- C.s. Lewis
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Time itself is one more name for death. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have the deepest respect even for Pagan myths, still more for the myths in Holy Scripture. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is much easier to pray for a bore than to go visit him. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are not meant to be perpetually solemn: We must play. -- C.s. Lewis
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Either the day must come when joy prevails and all the makers of misery are no longer able to infect it, or else, for ever and ever, the makers of misery can destroy in others the happiness they reject for themselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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We know nothing of religion here: we only think of Christ. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again. -- C.s. Lewis
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The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be. -- C.s. Lewis
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So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man ... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek, the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that is the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. -- C.s. Lewis
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A pipe gives a wise man time to think and a fool something to stick in his mouth. -- C.s. Lewis
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We're in a world where everything, even a lamp-post, comes to life and grows. Now I wonder what kind of a seed a lamp-post grows from ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you'll react into the opposite one, and he's got you. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sin both of men and of angels, was rendered possible by the fact that God gave us free will. -- C.s. Lewis
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Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do. -- C.s. Lewis
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That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporal sufferring, "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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Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you're making. -- C.s. Lewis
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They are all friends of mine and honest people. -- C.s. Lewis
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From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Yes," he said dully to the sorn. "That is my world." It was the bleakest moment in all his travels. -- C.s. Lewis
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Edmund, give a special goodbye to Trumpkin for me. He's been a brick. -- C.s. Lewis
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The bad preacher takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out into the traditional language of Christianity. The core of his thought is merely contemporary; only the superficies is traditional. But your teaching must be timeless at its heart and wear modern dress. -- C.s. Lewis
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If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved? -- C.s. Lewis
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Still, there's no denying that in some sense I 'feel better,' and with that comes at once a short of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one's unhappiness. -- C.s. Lewis
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Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. -- C.s. Lewis
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The discomfiture we feel may be our most accurate human sensation; reminding us we are not quite "at home" here. -- C.s. Lewis
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All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still 'about to be'. -- C.s. Lewis
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There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index. -- C.s. Lewis
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And men said that the blood of the stars flowed in her veins -- C.s. Lewis
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A Christian is not someone who never goes wrong, but one who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin again, because the Christ-life is inside him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everything becomes more and more itself. Here is joy that cannot be shaken. Our light can swallow up your darkness; but your darkness cannot now infect our light. -- C.s. Lewis
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Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nor am I greatly moved by jocular inquiries such as, 'Where will you put all the mosquitoes?'
a question to be answered on its own level by pointing out that, if the worst came to worst, a heaven for mosquitoes and a hell for men could very conveniently be combined. -- C.s. Lewis
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He cannot ravish; He can only woo. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is the food our spirits were designed to feed on. -- C.s. Lewis
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I mean, the more a man was in the Devil's power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he's drunk. -- C.s. Lewis
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My hope is that when I die, all of hell rejoices that I am out of the fight. -- C.s. Lewis
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A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save. -- C.s. Lewis
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I should be the last person to tell you that the plate is hot after you have burned your fingers. -- C.s. Lewis
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An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior -- C.s. Lewis
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Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are some things no man man face. -- C.s. Lewis
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But of course these conjectures as to why God does what He does are probably of no more value than my dog's ideas of what I am up to when I sit and read. -- C.s. Lewis
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It may be better to live under robber barons than omnipotent moral busybodies. -- C.s. Lewis
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Safe? Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. -- C.s. Lewis
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Yet I have often noticed since how much less stir nearly everyone's death makes than you might expect. Men better loved and more worth loving than my father go down making only a small eddy. -- C.s. Lewis
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I cannot be the only reader who has wondered why God, having given him [St. Paul] so many gifts, withheld from him (what would seem so necessary for the first Christian theologian) that of lucidity and orderly exposition. -- C.s. Lewis
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God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form ... The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man. -- C.s. Lewis
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The true enjoyments must be spontaneous and compulsive and look to no remoter end. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once people stop believing in God, the problem is not that they will believe in nothing; rather, the problem is that they will believe anything. -- C.s. Lewis
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[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop. -- C.s. Lewis
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A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one. -- C.s. Lewis
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I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't. -- C.s. Lewis
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The 'frankness' of people sunk below shame is a very cheap frankness. -- C.s. Lewis
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This wasn't a garden,' said Susan presently. 'It was a castle ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines. -- C.s. Lewis
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As for wrinkles
Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? -- C.s. Lewis
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On fine nights when the cold and the drumtaps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. -- C.s. Lewis
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A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls. -- C.s. Lewis
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You die and you die and then you are beyond death. -- C.s. Lewis
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As long as he doesn't convert it into action, it does not matter how much a man thinks about his repentance. -- C.s. Lewis
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Daughter," said the Hermit, "I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never met any such thing as Luck. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love ... is a deep unity maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both parents ask, and receive, from God. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not fore nothing that you are named Ransom. -- C.s. Lewis
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A great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where virute is concerned, Experience is the mother of illusion. -- C.s. Lewis
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He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand. -- C.s. Lewis
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You may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God. -- C.s. Lewis
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I wish she would grow up. She wasted all her school time wanting to be the age she is now, and she'll waste all the rest of her life trying to stay that age. He whole idea is to race on to the silliest time of one's life as quick as she can and then stop there as long as she can. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe that there are too many accommodating preachers ... Jesus Christ did not say "Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right." The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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For agnosticism is, in a sense, what I am preaching. I do not wish to reduce the sceptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. -- C.s. Lewis
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Milton was right,' said my Teacher. 'The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven." There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery. There is always something they prefer to joy - that is, to reality. -- C.s. Lewis
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My dear young lady,' said the professor ... 'there is one plan which no one has yet suggested and which is well worth trying.'
'What's that?' said Susan.
'We might all try minding our own business ... -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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What we work out in our journals we don't take out on family and friends. -- C.s. Lewis
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Not to be, but to seem, virtuous - it is a formula whose utility we all discovered in the nursery. -- C.s. Lewis
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I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers "I've read it already" to be a conclusive argument against reading a work ... Those read great works,on the other hand will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of there life. -- C.s. Lewis
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There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. -- C.s. Lewis
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An author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do not believe God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. -- C.s. Lewis
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For He claims all, because He is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless He has us. -- C.s. Lewis
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But if naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. Therefore, all thoughts would be equally worthless. Therefore, naturalism is worthless. If it is true, then we can know no truths. It cuts its own throat. -- C.s. Lewis
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If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes ... it cuts its own throat. -- C.s. Lewis
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Open, oh coloured world, without weight, without shore. You are second and better; this was first and feeble. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there? -- C.s. Lewis
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I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering. -- C.s. Lewis
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Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality. -- C.s. Lewis
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In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself. -- C.s. Lewis
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In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is, but only what it is made of. -- C.s. Lewis
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First be sure that you know exactly what you want to say. Then be sure you have said exactly that. -- C.s. Lewis
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I could well believe that it is God's intention, since we have refused milder remedies, to compel [Christians] into unity, by persecution even. Satan is without doubt nothing else than a hammer in the hand of a benevolent and severe God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn to God when everything is going well for us. We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. -- C.s. Lewis
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What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects
with their Christianity latent. -- C.s. Lewis
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An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald] -- C.s. Lewis
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The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart. -- C.s. Lewis
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end.' The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you call your 'faith' in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all - not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Certain things, if not seen as lovely or detestable, are not being correctly seen at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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If it is foolish and impudent to ask for victory in a war (on the ground that God might be expected to know best), it would be equally foolish and impudent to put on a mackintosh - does not God know best whether you ought to be wet or dry? -- C.s. Lewis
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Sexual intercourse is rapidly becoming the one thing venerated in a world without veneration. -- C.s. Lewis
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Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives. -- C.s. Lewis
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The author says the mark of a true rest your creature is an inability to be still without a kind of resignation. -- C.s. Lewis
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The cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning! -- C.s. Lewis
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Obedience is the road to freedom. -- C.s. Lewis
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A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun. -- C.s. Lewis
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I perceived now that there is a love deeper than theirs who seek only the happiness of their beloved. Would a father see his daughter happy as a whore? Would a woman see her lover happy as a coward? -- C.s. Lewis
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they'd have him as right as rain in a day or two. And -- C.s. Lewis
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To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you. -- C.s. Lewis
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To excuse what can really produce good excuses is not Christian charity; it is only fairness. To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable in you. -- C.s. Lewis
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God doesn't want us to suffer, he wants us to grow up -- C.s. Lewis
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The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus. -- C.s. Lewis
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Here and here only in all time the myth must have become fact; the Word, flesh; God, Man. This is not 'a religion', nor 'a philosophy.' It is the summing up and actuality of them all. -- C.s. Lewis
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The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. -- C.s. Lewis
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If God is satisfied with the work, the work may be satisfied with itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties! -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone who believes in God at all believes that he knows what you and I are going to do tomorrow. -- C.s. Lewis
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The kind of people we are is more important than what we can do to improve the world; indeed being the kind of people we should and can be is the best, and sometimes the only way to improve the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Harold says one of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to Facts. It -- C.s. Lewis
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Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms. -- C.s. Lewis
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We do not come to God as bad people trying to become good people; we come as rebels to lay down our arms. -- C.s. Lewis
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The weakest of my people does not fear death. It is the Bent One, the lord of your world, who wastes your lives and befouls them with flying from what you know will overtake you in the end. If you were the subjects of Maleldil you would have peace. p. 140 -- C.s. Lewis
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A woman's heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her. -- C.s. Lewis
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To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography. -- C.s. Lewis
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Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. -- C.s. Lewis
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Not that we must always partake of [God's feast] solemnly. "God who made good laughter" forbid. It is one of the difficult and delightful subtleties of life that we must deeply acknowledge certain things to be serious and yet retain the power and will to treat them often as lightly as a game. -- C.s. Lewis
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Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again. -- C.s. Lewis
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Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer. -- C.s. Lewis
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If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art ... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. -- C.s. Lewis
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They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pain is God's megaphone -- C.s. Lewis
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All my life the god of the Mountain has been wooing me. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time. -- C.s. Lewis
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He would have made them as your people are now- wise enough to see the death of their kind approaching but not wise enough to endure it. -- C.s. Lewis
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A simpler form of the same objection consists in saying that death ought not to be final, that there ought to be a second chance. I believe that if a million chances were likely to do good, they would be given. -- C.s. Lewis
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It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. -- C.s. Lewis
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The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us. -- C.s. Lewis
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Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now ... Come further up, come further in! -- C.s. Lewis
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Reality, looked at steadily, is unbearable. -- C.s. Lewis
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The value of the individual does not lie in him. He receives it by union with Christ. -- C.s. Lewis
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I couldn't believe that nine-hundred and ninety-nine religions were completely false and the remaining one true. In reality, Christianity is primarily the fulfilment of the Jewish religion, but also the fulfilment of what was vaguely hinted in all the religions at their best. What -- C.s. Lewis
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Well, sir, if things are real, they're there all the time."
"Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say. -- C.s. Lewis
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Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably. -- C.s. Lewis
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Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. -- C.s. Lewis
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You have never talked to a mere mortal. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that 'In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth'. -- C.s. Lewis
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The laws of thought are also the laws of things: of things in the remotest space and the remotest time. -- C.s. Lewis
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His hands had been reddened, as all men's hands have been, in the slaying before the foundation of the world; now, if he chose, he would dip them again in the same blood. 'Mercy,' he groaned ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Whenever all men are ... hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else -- C.s. Lewis
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And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back
if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day? -- C.s. Lewis
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Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it the whole world would be converted and happy before the year's end. -- C.s. Lewis
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No thanks," said Digory, "I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. -- C.s. Lewis
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we had better do what we have to do at once. -- C.s. Lewis
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I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out. -- C.s. Lewis
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No one can mark the exact moment at which friendship becomes love. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christ wants us to have a child's heart but a grown-up's head. -- C.s. Lewis
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Extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people. Maybe it's a sign that you've got an extraordinary destiny
something greater than you could've imagined. -- C.s. Lewis
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But sweat is the kindest creature of the three - far better than philosophy, as a cure for ill thoughts. -- C.s. Lewis
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It's expression was solemn, its complexion muddy. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you are thirsty, come and drink. -- C.s. Lewis
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The tuning up of an orchestra can be itself delightful, but only to those who can in some measure, however little, anticipate the symphony. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it. -- C.s. Lewis
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You are speaking ... as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing ... what you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure. -- C.s. Lewis
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The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received. -- C.s. Lewis
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Very often, however, this silly procedure is adopted by people who are not silly, but who, consciously or unconsciously, want to destroy Christianity. Such people put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack. -- C.s. Lewis
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Adventures are never fun while you're having them. -- C.s. Lewis
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its evident wish to be for ever a sound and only a sound in the thickest centre of untravelled woods. -- C.s. Lewis
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The creature was there, a curiously shaped creature no doubt, but all loathing had vanished clean out of his mind, so that neither then nor at any other time could he remember it, nor ever understand again why one should quarrel with an animal for having more legs or eyes than oneself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Enemy occupied territory is what the world is. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. -- C.s. Lewis
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The surest way of spoiling a pleasure [is] to start examining your satisfaction. -- C.s. Lewis
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No man who says, 'I'm as good as you,' believes it. He would not say it if he did. -- C.s. Lewis
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One gets glimpses, even in our country, of that which is ageless
heavy thought in the face of an infant, and frolic childhood in that of a very old man. -- C.s. Lewis
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You have no idea what an appetite it gives one, being executed. -- C.s. Lewis
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Look for Christ and you will find Him. And with Him everything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now. -- C.s. Lewis
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Since it is so likely children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. -- C.s. Lewis
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Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more. -- C.s. Lewis
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Many things
such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly
are done worst when we try hardest to do them. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons. -- C.s. Lewis
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The characteristic of Pains and Pleasures is that they are unmistakably real, and therefore, as far as they go, give the man who feels them a touchstone of reality. -- C.s. Lewis
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She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then
Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him. -- C.s. Lewis
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God has given to His works His own character of emeth; they are watertight, faithful, reliable, not at all vague or phantasmal. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who do not think about their own sins make up for it by thinking incessantly about the sins of others. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sainthood lies in the habit of referring the smallest actions to God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church. -- C.s. Lewis
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They are given wings at all in order to suggest the swiftness of unimpeded intellectual energy. They are given human form because man is the only rational creature we know. -- C.s. Lewis
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I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose. -- C.s. Lewis
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The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for. -- C.s. Lewis
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An Ulster Scot may come to disbelieve in God, but not to wear his weekday clothes on the Sabbath. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only way to drive out bad culture is to create good culture. We need to recognize that artistic talent is a gift from the Lord - and that developing those talents is the only way to create good culture. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed. -- C.s. Lewis
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My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it Himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region. -- C.s. Lewis
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Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is ... is it not yet enough? -- C.s. Lewis
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Therefore, in love, He claims all. There's no bargaining with Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must picture hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives with the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment. -- C.s. Lewis
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At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thus Tyrants could practice, in a sense, "democracy." But now "democracy" can do the same work without any tyranny other than her own. -- C.s. Lewis
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The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. -- C.s. Lewis
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For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. -- C.s. Lewis
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In worship, God imparts himself to us. -- C.s. Lewis
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The new King of Narnia helped both the children up: that is, he gave Digory a rough heave and set Polly as gently and daintily on the horse's back as if she were made of china and might break. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Lion said nothing and Digory knew that he had not told enough. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not dare not to dare. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased. -- C.s. Lewis
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For all find what they truly seek. -- C.s. Lewis
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To see things as the poet sees them I must share his consciousness and not attend to it; I must look where he looks and not turn round to face him; I must make of him not a spectacle but a pair of spectacles; in fine, as Professor Alexander would say, I must enjoy him and not contemplate him. -- C.s. Lewis
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At the very least, they can be persuaded that the bodily position makes no difference to their prayers; for they constantly forget[ ... ]that they are animals and that whatever their bodies do affects their souls. -- C.s. Lewis
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A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent. -- C.s. Lewis
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Has not one of the poets said that a noble friend is the best gift and a noble enemy the next best? -- C.s. Lewis
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Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. -- C.s. Lewis
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I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily. -- C.s. Lewis
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Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pain plants the flag of truth within a rebel fortress. -- C.s. Lewis
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The fatal false step which, once taken, would thrust her down into the terrible slavery of appetite and hate and economics and government which our race knows so well. -- C.s. Lewis
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For a Christian, there are, strictly speaking, no chances. A secret Master of the Ceremonies has been at work. -- C.s. Lewis
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You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity and Buddhism are a lot alike, especially Buddhism. -- C.s. Lewis
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Provocation doesn't make me ill-tempered: it only shows me how ill-tempered I am. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christ says that He is 'humble and meek' and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you give such a creature two blows with a whip, there are, indeed, two pains: but there is no co-ordinating self which can recognise that 'I have had two pains'. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is mere nonsense to put pain among the discoveries of science. Lay down this book and reflect for five minutes on the fact that all the great religions were first preached, and long practiced, in a world without chloroform. -- C.s. Lewis
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One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them. -- C.s. Lewis
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And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don't agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ -- C.s. Lewis
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And that was the very end of the adventure of the wardrobe. But if the Professor was right, it was only the beginning of the adventures of Narnia. -- C.s. Lewis
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Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of course the cat will growl and spit at the operator and bite him if she can. But the real question is whether he is a vet or a vivisector. -- C.s. Lewis
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100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you find that the reader of popular romances
however uneducated a reader, however bad the romances
goes back to his old favourites again and again, then you have pretty good evidence that they are to him a sort of poetry. -- C.s. Lewis
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This is the courtesy of Deep Heaven: that when you mean well, He always takes you to have meant better than you knew. It will not be enough for always. He is very jealous. He will have you for no one but Himself in the end. But for tonight, it is enough. -- C.s. Lewis
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Instead of getting drowsier she was getting more awake - with an odd night-time, dreamish kind of wakefulness. -- C.s. Lewis
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The very nature of Joy makes nonsense of our common distinction between having and wanting. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless he sees that it is good for him to wait. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing is really ours until we share it. -- C.s. Lewis
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The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nowhere in Chaucer do we find what can be called a radically allegorical poem. -- C.s. Lewis
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Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet. -- C.s. Lewis
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I will not be at the mercy of the telephone! -- C.s. Lewis
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Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whatever men expect, they soon come to think they have a right to; the sense of disappointment can, with very little skill on our part, be turned into a sense of injury. (senior devil speaking) -- C.s. Lewis
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Abstain from all thinking about other people's faults, unless your duties as a teacher or parent make it necessary to think about them. Whenever the thoughts come unnecessarily into one's mind, why not simply shove them away? And think of one's own faults instead? For -- C.s. Lewis
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The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable. -- C.s. Lewis
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We do not truly see light, we only see slower things lit by it. -- C.s. Lewis
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If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are apt to think that God only wants actions of a particular kind, whereas He is most interested in people of a particular sort. -- C.s. Lewis
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If there is an itch one does want to scratch; but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sweet master doctor, learned master doctor, who ever heard of a witch that really died? You can always get them back. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. -- C.s. Lewis
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I'd like to walk there again. It was so lonely - a nice kind of loneliness, and all grass and clover and soft sea air. -- C.s. Lewis
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Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one. -- C.s. Lewis
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I sometimes think that writing is like driving a sheep down the road. If there's any gate open to the left or the right the reader will most certainly go into it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ne of the purposes for which God instituted prayer may have been to bear witness that the course of events is not governed like a state but created like a work of art to which every being makes a conscious contribution, and in which every being is both a means and an end. -- C.s. Lewis
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As there is one Face above all worlds merely to see which is irrevocable joy, so at the bottom of all worlds that face is waiting whose sight alone is the misery from which none who beholds it can recover. -- C.s. Lewis
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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 wel say that birth doesn't matter. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. -- C.s. Lewis
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I fancy that most of those who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of Course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did, He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is) ... Continue seeking Him with seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have seen great beauty of spirit in some who were great sufferers. I have seen men, for the most part, grow better not worse with advancing years, and I have seen the last illness produce treasures of fortitude and meekness from most unpromising subjects. -- C.s. Lewis
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All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever. -- C.s. Lewis
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A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it. -- C.s. Lewis
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The salvation of a single soul is more important than the production or preservation of all the epics and tragedies in the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature. -- C.s. Lewis
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Children have one kind of silliness, as you know, and grown-ups have another kind. -- C.s. Lewis
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We find ourselves in a world of transporting pleasures, ravishing beauties, and tantalising possibilities, but all constantly being destroyed, all coming to nothing. Nature has all the air of a good thing spoiled. -- C.s. Lewis
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Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through. -- C.s. Lewis
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For nothing is more suitable to persons of gravity and decorum than to endure minor inconvenience with constancy -- C.s. Lewis
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But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Order of the Divine mind, embodied in the Divine Law, is beautiful. What should a man do but try to reproduce it, so far as possible, in his daily life? -- C.s. Lewis
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The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance. -- C.s. Lewis
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The problem with trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you so very often succeed. -- C.s. Lewis
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If only this toothache would go away, I could write another chapter on the problem of pain. -- C.s. Lewis
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beneath the fragile and very human veneer of the organized churches of the world, there lies a truth so real and so pristine that all of man's concocted philosophical posings tumble into ruin beside it. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come. -- C.s. Lewis
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Please, Aslan," said Lucy, "what do you call soon?"
"I call all times soon", said Aslan. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whenever a person dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people's religions, he is in a bad condition. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table. -- C.s. Lewis
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Bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love. -- C.s. Lewis
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An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons - marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning. One -- C.s. Lewis
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And all next day and all the next it went on. It went on till one could hardly even remember a time before it had begun. And -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity is the story of how the rightful King has landed, you might say in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in His great campaign of sabotage. -- C.s. Lewis
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Enemy-occupied territory
that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. -- C.s. Lewis
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The master demon Screwtape identifies elitist humanity's tendency toward an ingrained habit of belittling anything that concerns the great mass of their fellow men. -- C.s. Lewis
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The malice thus becomes wholly real and the benevolence largely imaginary. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by
which a frightened man reimburses himself for the miseries of Fear. The more he fears, the more he will hate. - Screwtape -- C.s. Lewis
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Prosperity knits a man to the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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When He talks of their losing their selves, He only means abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. Hence, -- C.s. Lewis
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When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever. -- C.s. Lewis
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There was, no doubt, a confusion of persons in damnation: what Pantheists falsely hoped of Heaven bad men really received in Hell. They were melted down into their Master, as a lead soldier slips down and loses his shape in the ladle over the gas ring. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. -- C.s. Lewis
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When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive. -- C.s. Lewis
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The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it. -- C.s. Lewis
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What can you ever really know of other people's souls - of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole of creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success. -- C.s. Lewis
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No tea cup is big enough nor book long enough for me to be satisfied. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the Divine Nature can change the past. Nothing is yet in its true form. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the feasts on the poop and the musicians. -- C.s. Lewis
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Will the others see you too?" asked Lucy.
"Certainly not at first," said Aslan. "Later on, it depends."
"But they won't believe me!" said Lucy.
"It doesn't matter. -- C.s. Lewis
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If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. -- C.s. Lewis
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The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred -- C.s. Lewis
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Narnia! It's all in the wardrobe just like I told you! -- C.s. Lewis
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The man can neither man, nor retain, one moment of time; it all comes to him by pure gift; he might as well regard the sun and moon as his chattels. -- C.s. Lewis
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Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth. -- C.s. Lewis
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Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Where can you taste the joy of obeying unless He bids you do something for which His bidding is the only reason? -- C.s. Lewis
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We were talking of DRAGONS, Tolkien and I
In a Berkshire bar. The big workman
Who had sat silent and sucked his pipe
All the evening, from his empty mug
With gleaming eye glanced towards us:
"I seen 'em myself!" he said fiercely. -- C.s. Lewis
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The beasts would not think it hard if I told them to walk on their heads. It would become their delight to walk on their heads. I am His beast, and all His biddings are joys. -- C.s. Lewis
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It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake. -- C.s. Lewis
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To be a queen-that would not sweeten the bitter water against which I had been building the dam in my soul. It might strengthen the dam, though. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is only when you are asked to believe in Reason coming from non-reason that you must cry Halt. Human minds. They do not come from nowhere. -- C.s. Lewis
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the Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains the memory of what it ought to have been. -- C.s. Lewis
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'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another. -- 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
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I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy. The -- C.s. Lewis
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The greed to be loved is a fearful thing. Some of those who say that they live only for love come to live in incessant resentment. -- C.s. Lewis
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Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even agony into a glory -- C.s. Lewis
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We were made not primarily that we may love God, but that God may love us. -- C.s. Lewis
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The unhistorical are usually, without knowing it, enslaved to a fairly recent past. -- C.s. Lewis
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On many questions and specially in view of the marriage bed, the Puritans were the indulgent party, ... they were much more Chestertonian than their adversaries. The idea that a Puritan was a repressed and repressive person would have astonished Sir Thomas More and Luther about equally. -- C.s. Lewis
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I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them. -- C.s. Lewis
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When a word ceases to be a term of description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you about the object: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to that object. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pain is G-d's megaphone to wake up the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even if there were pains in Heaven, all who understand would desire them. -- C.s. Lewis
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If anything is to exist at all, then the Original Thing must be, not a principle nor a generality, much less an 'ideal' or a 'value', but an utterly concrete fact. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man who has been in another world does not come back unchanged. -- C.s. Lewis
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[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am conscious of a partly pathological hostility toward what is fashionable. -- C.s. Lewis
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In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people. -- C.s. Lewis
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The duty of planning tomorrow's work is today's duty; though its material is borrowed from the future, the duty, like all duties, is in the Present. -- C.s. Lewis
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You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And -- C.s. Lewis
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Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. -- C.s. Lewis
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Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end. -- C.s. Lewis
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The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career. -- C.s. Lewis
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Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone's done it before. I don't suppose they have. Oh, bother - -Scrubb probably has! -- C.s. Lewis
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I was quite safe. That is why the Lion kept on my left. He was between me and the edge all the time. -- C.s. Lewis
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Obedience is the key that opens every door. -- C.s. Lewis
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It you'd only listen to me when I tried to tell you, we'd be all right. -- C.s. Lewis
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[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that. -- C.s. Lewis
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He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants everyone to use what sense they have. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present; one of those black moods in which nearly all one's friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil. -- C.s. Lewis
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The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'. -- C.s. Lewis
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... for everything now felt as if it had been fated or had happened before. -- C.s. Lewis
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But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it. -- C.s. Lewis
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[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into ... It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death. -- C.s. Lewis
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The lesser of the evils now before us is to abandon all moral censorship. We have either sunk beneath or risen above it. If we do, there will be reams of filth. But we need not read it. Nor, probably, will the fashion last for ever. Four-letter words may soon be as dated as antimacassars. -- C.s. Lewis
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After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, 'I am.' To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop. -- C.s. Lewis
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How difficult it is to avoid having a special standard for oneself. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. -- C.s. Lewis
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Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. -- C.s. Lewis
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I now saw, with great dismay, that what I had been carrying all this time was not a bowl but a book. This ruined everything. -- C.s. Lewis
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Blowed if I ain't all in a muck sweat,' said the Giant, puffing like the largest railway engine. 'Comes of being out of condition. I suppose neither of you young Ladies has such a thing as a pocket-hankerchee about you? -- C.s. Lewis
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Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die. -- C.s. Lewis
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It seems, then, we are forced to believe in a real Right and Wrong. People may be sometimes mistaken about them, just as people sometimes get their sums wrong, but they are not a matter of mere taste and opinion any more than the multiplication table. -- C.s. Lewis
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The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life. -- C.s. Lewis
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Democracy demands that little men should not take big ones too seriously; it dies when it is full of little men who think they are big themselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road. -- C.s. Lewis
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The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure. -- C.s. Lewis
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She made beauty all round her. When she trod on mud, the mud was beautiful; when she ran in the rain, the rain was silver. When she picked up a toad - she had the strangest and, I thought, unchanciest love for all manner of brutes - the toad became beautiful. -- C.s. Lewis
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We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all." -- C.s. Lewis
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No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens - the heavens which declared the glory - the happy climes that ly Where day never shuts his eye Up in the broad fields of the sky. He quoted Milton's words to himself lovingly, at this time and often. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another What! You too? I thought that no one but myself ... -- C.s. Lewis
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In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now that the very name "space" seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it 'dead'; he felt life pouring in at every moment. -- C.s. Lewis
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Humility is self-forgetfulness. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason. -- C.s. Lewis
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History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong. -- C.s. Lewis
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I sometimes wonder if all pleasures are not substitutes for joy. -- C.s. Lewis
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While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of. -- C.s. Lewis
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In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. -- C.s. Lewis
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Read and Re-Read
Re-reading, we always find a new book. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we carry out our "religious duties" we are like people digging channels in a waterless land, in order that when at last water comes, it may find them ready. -- C.s. Lewis
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Truth is always about something, but reality is that about which truth is. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god. -- C.s. Lewis
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IT IS A COMMON REPROACH AGAINST CHRISTIANITY THAT ITS dogmas are unchanging, while human knowledge is in continual growth. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do wish Slumtrimpet could do something about undermining that young woman's sense of the ridiculous. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do not look at myself. I have given up myself. I had to, you know, after the murder. That was what it did for me. And that was how everything began -- C.s. Lewis
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The event of falling in love ... in one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nobody who gets enough food and clothing in a world where most are hungry and cold has any business to talk about 'misery.' -- C.s. Lewis
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We thought the Duke would have been pleased if the King's Majesty would have married his daughter, but nothing came of that
'
Squints, and has freckles,' said Caspian.
Oh, poor girl,' said Lucy. -- C.s. Lewis
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They were no words. There was hardly even a tune. But it was, beyond comparison, the most beautiful noise he had ever heard. It was so beautiful he could hardly bear it. -- C.s. Lewis
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There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us? -- C.s. Lewis
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The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so. -- C.s. Lewis
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The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!' Thanks to our labours, this will mean increasingly, 'Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite'. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing in Man is either worse or better for being shared with the beasts. -- C.s. Lewis
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For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity. -- C.s. Lewis
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Why should your heart not dance? -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh, that? I never thought it was eavesdropping, Aslan. Wasn't it magic?"
"Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way. -- C.s. Lewis
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You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve," said Aslan. "And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior. -- C.s. Lewis
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Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets
themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme. -- C.s. Lewis
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You must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no excess of goodness. You cannot go too far in the right direction. -- C.s. Lewis
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Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have seen death fairly often and never yet been able to find it anything but extraordinary and rather incredible. The real person is so very real, so obviously living and different from what is left that one cannot believe something has turned to nothing. -- C.s. Lewis
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If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christ did not die for man because they were intrinsically worth dying for, but because he is intrinsically love, and therefore loves infinitely. -- C.s. Lewis
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We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it. -- C.s. Lewis
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You have lived on broken hearts all your life," said Caspian, "and if you are beggared, it is better to be a beggar than a slave. But where is my other friend? -- C.s. Lewis
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He could dispatch a beast with one blow of his tail so that it didn't know (and presumably still doesn't know) it had been killed. He -- C.s. Lewis
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He was a very humane killer too, for he would dispatch a beast with one blow of it's talk so that it didn't know (and presumably doesn't know) it had been killed. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man really ought to say, 'The Resurrection happened two thousand years ago' in the same spirit in which he says, 'I saw a crocus yesterday.' Because we know what is coming behind the crocus. -- C.s. Lewis
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Naturally God knows how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another. -- C.s. Lewis
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Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Have you not seen that in our days
Of any whose story, song or art
Delights us, our sincerest praise
Means, when all's said, 'You break my heart? -- C.s. Lewis
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If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been a proof that you were not. -- C.s. Lewis
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The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real. -- C.s. Lewis
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Lucy looked and saw that Aslan had just breathed on the feet of the stone giant.
It's all right!" shouted Aslan joyously. "Once The feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow. -- C.s. Lewis
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A little lie is like a little pregnancy it doesn't take long before everyone knows. -- C.s. Lewis
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All shall be done, but it may be harder than you think. -- C.s. Lewis
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I dread specialists in power because they are specialists speaking outside of their special subject. -- C.s. Lewis
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Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad. -- C.s. Lewis
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Heaven offers nothing that a mercenary soul can desire. -- C.s. Lewis
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You're a tree in whose shadow we can't thrive. We want to be our own. -- C.s. Lewis
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To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. -- C.s. Lewis
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For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John. -- C.s. Lewis
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Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal. -- C.s. Lewis
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And this is the marvel of marvels; that he called me Beloved. -- C.s. Lewis
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God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way. -- C.s. Lewis
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The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thought is what we start from: the simple, intimate, immediate datum. Matter is the inferred thing, the mystery. -- C.s. Lewis
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Besides reasoning about matters of fact, men also make moral judgements. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are what we believe we are! -- C.s. Lewis
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When one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else - even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments. -- C.s. Lewis
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As someone has said "gods" is not really the plural of God; God has no plural. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the end the number of things he thought of saying all at once nearly suffocated him and he became silent. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing gives one a more spuriously good conscience than keeping rules, even if there has been a total absence of all real charity and faith. -- C.s. Lewis
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Please,' she said, 'You're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd rather be eaten by you than fed by anyone else. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. -- C.s. Lewis
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You have noticed, I hope, that man is the only amateur animal; all the other are professionals. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power
it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk. -- C.s. Lewis
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That's true to life.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or
reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on
thinking about the fact that you suffer. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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I have often repented of speech but hardly ever of silence. -- C.s. Lewis
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No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights. -- C.s. Lewis
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Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we cannot persuade our friends by reasons we must be content "and not bring a mercenary army to our aid" (He meant passions.) -- C.s. Lewis
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Some people probably think of the Resurrection as a desperate last moment expedient to save the Hero from a situation which had got out of the Author's control. -- C.s. Lewis
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I ended my first book with the words 'no answer.' I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice? Only words, words; to be led out to battle against other words. -- C.s. Lewis
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Putting on Christ' ... is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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When once passion takes part in the game, the human reason, unassisted by Grace, has about as much chance of retaining its hold on truths already gained as a snowflake has of retaining its consistency in the mouth of a blast furnace. -- C.s. Lewis
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The powers which enable evil to carry on are powers given it by goodness. All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things - resolution, cleverness, good looks, existence itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator - to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy. -- C.s. Lewis
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He can practise self-examination for an hour without discovering any of those facts about himself which are perfectly clear to anyone who has ever lived in the same house with him or worked in the same office. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you make the adults of today Christian, the children of tomorrow will receive a Christian education. What a society has, that, be sure, and nothing else, it will hand on to its young. -- C.s. Lewis
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Although he didn't care much about any subject for its own sake, he cared a great deal about marks (grades or comparisons). -- C.s. Lewis
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For the entrance is low: we must stoop till we are no taller than children to get in. -- C.s. Lewis
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One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts. -- C.s. Lewis
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Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we really want to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't think of God in terms of forms, because forms are limited and God is unlimited. -- C.s. Lewis
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If he now failed, this world also would hereafter be redeemed. If he were not the ransom, another would be. Yet nothing was ever repeated. Not a second crucifixion; perhaps-who knows-not even a second Incarnation ... some act of even more appalling love, some glory of yet deeper humility. -- C.s. Lewis
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The real pacificus is he who promotes peace, not he who gasses about it. -- C.s. Lewis
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You see, friends, he said, that before the new, clean world I gave you is seven hours old, a force of evil has already entered it; waked and brought hither by this son of Adam. -- C.s. Lewis
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We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may "conquer" them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hypothesis, my dear young friend, establishes itself by a cumulative process: or, to use popular language, if you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. After -- C.s. Lewis
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One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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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 every having noticed it. -- C.s. Lewis
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You are guilty of no evil, Ransom of Thulcandra, except a little fearfulness. For that, the journey you go on is your pain, and perhaps your cure: for you must be either mad or brave before it is ended. -- C.s. Lewis
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Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well? -- C.s. Lewis
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Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat. -- C.s. Lewis
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The inherent dialectic of desire itself had in way already shown me this; for all images and sensations, if idolatrously mistaken for Joy itself, soon honestly confessed themselves inadequate. All said, in the last resort, It is not I. I am only a reminder. Look! Look! What do I remind you of? -- C.s. Lewis
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A myth is a lie that conveys a truth. -- C.s. Lewis
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A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute. -- C.s. Lewis
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The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now it is time!" then louder, "Time!"; and then so loud it could have shaken the stars; "TIME." The door flew open. -- C.s. Lewis
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Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don't implement promises, but keep them. -- C.s. Lewis
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I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal. -- C.s. Lewis
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The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes. -- C.s. Lewis
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But the detail of the poem shows power akin to genius, and reveals to us that much neglected law of literary history
that potential genius can never become actual unless it finds or makes the Form which it requires. -- C.s. Lewis
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Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. -- C.s. Lewis
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But what am I to do? I must have some drug, and reading isn't a strong enough drug now. By writing it all down (all? - no: one thought in a hundred) I believe I get a little outside it. That's how I'd defend it to H. But ten to one she'd see a hole in the defence. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are king's daughters still," I said. -- C.s. Lewis
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[The enemy] has filled His world full of pleasures ... Everything has to be twisted before it is any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side. (Not that that excuses you ... ) -- C.s. Lewis
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How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete. -- C.s. Lewis
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Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position. -- C.s. Lewis
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Something quite unexpected has happened. It came this morning early. For various reasons, not in themselves at all mysterious, my heart was lighter than it had been for many weeks. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our desire is not only to SEE glory, but to participate in the glory we see. -- C.s. Lewis
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I was sick with desire; that sickness better than health. -- C.s. Lewis
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The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident. -- C.s. Lewis
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I want God, not my idea of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some of the miracles do locally what God has already done universally: others do locally what He has not yet done, but will do. -- C.s. Lewis
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He's right. We have to help Mr. Tumnus. -- C.s. Lewis
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Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair. -- C.s. Lewis
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Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward. -- C.s. Lewis
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Well, whatever they say, you don't feel like ghosts. -- C.s. Lewis
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Why should quiet ruminants as you and I have been born in such a ghastly age? -- C.s. Lewis
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Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now it may surprise you to learn that in His efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks; some of His special favourites have gone through longer and deeper throughs than anyone else. -- C.s. Lewis
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The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life. -- C.s. Lewis
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He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools. -- C.s. Lewis
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Give no poor fool the pretext to think ye are claiming knowledge of what no mortal knows. -- C.s. Lewis
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Be just and merciful and brave. -- C.s. Lewis
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We all appear as dunces when feigning an interest in things we care nothing about. -- C.s. Lewis
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We read to know we are not alone (obviously not mine but good) -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't shine so others can see you. Shine so that through you, others can see Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh, I'm a dangerous criminal, I am,' said the dwarf cheerfully. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is. -- C.s. Lewis
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Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? -- C.s. Lewis
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The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one! -- C.s. Lewis
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Any patch of sunlight in a wood will show you something about the sun which you could never get from reading books on astronomy. These pure and spontaneous pleasures are 'patches of Godlight' in the woods of our experience. -- C.s. Lewis
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Each new power won by man is a power over man as well. Each advance leaves him weaker as well as stronger. -- C.s. Lewis
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They have pulled down deep heaven on their heads. -- C.s. Lewis
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If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all -- C.s. Lewis
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The basic proposal of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be 'undemocratic. -- C.s. Lewis
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When they told him this, Ransom at last understood why mythology was what it was
gleams of celestial strength and beauty falling on a jungle of filth and imbecility. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival? -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are. -- C.s. Lewis
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On the back of Satan's neck is a nail scarred footprint. -- C.s. Lewis
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You look right out into the high place and see the great dance with your own eyes. You live always in that terror and that delight. -- C.s. Lewis
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IF you think you can your probally right, if you think you can't, your probally right, -- C.s. Lewis
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The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out. -- C.s. Lewis
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A noble friend is the best gift. A noble enemy is the next best. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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The harder you tried not to think, the more you thought. -- C.s. Lewis
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God wants a child's heart and a grownup's head. -- C.s. Lewis
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The real moon,if you could reach it and survive it, would in a deep and deadly sense be just like anywhere else ... no man would find an abiding strangness on the moon unless he were the sort of man who could find it in his own back garden. -- C.s. Lewis
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As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation. -- C.s. Lewis
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It must be a really great book because one can read it as a boy in one way, and then re-read it in middle life and get something very different out of it - and that to my mind is one of the best tests. -- C.s. Lewis
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What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must, on pain of idiocy, deny from the very outset the idea that looking at is, by its own nature, intrinsically truer or better than looking along. -- C.s. Lewis
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Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine. -- C.s. Lewis
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Mere numbers could not overawe us unless we lent them, from our own resources, that awfulness which they themselves could no more supply than a banker's ledger. -- C.s. Lewis
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The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. -- C.s. Lewis
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Anyone who endeavors to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. You are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is a happy moment when our desire crosses with the will of Heavenly Father. -- C.s. Lewis
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Men propound mathematical theorems in besieged cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on the scaffold, discuss a new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature. -- C.s. Lewis
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-I'm not sure it isn't going to kill me. But it is the death I would have chosen- if I'd known about it till now. -- C.s. Lewis
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The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? -- C.s. Lewis
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Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us - an energy which, if not thus distorted, would have blossomed into one of those holy acts whereof 'God did it' and 'I did it' are both true descriptions. -- C.s. Lewis
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Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man's life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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The tortures occur, if they are unnecessary, then there is no God, or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary for no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren't. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the moral sphere, every act of justice or charity involves putting ourselves in the other person's place and thus transcending our own competitive particularity. -- C.s. Lewis
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Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not fatigue simply as such that produces the anger, but unexpected demands on a man already tired. -- C.s. Lewis
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The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers. -- C.s. Lewis
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I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't you understand anything? Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. Of course we're non-political. The real power always is. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ever since I served as an infantryman in the First World War I had a great dislike of people who themselves in ease and safety, issue exhortations to men in the front line. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing is more likely to destroy a species or a nation than a determination to survive at all costs -- C.s. Lewis
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Shafts of delicious sunlight struck down onto the forest floor and overhead you could see a blue sky between the tree tops. -- C.s. Lewis
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He was almost afraid to be alone with himself and yet he was ashamed to be with others. -- C.s. Lewis
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You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues. -- C.s. Lewis
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Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. -- C.s. Lewis
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Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand. -- C.s. Lewis
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All joy ... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace. -- C.s. Lewis
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He is indeed but breathing dust and a careless touch would unmake him. And in his best thoughts there are such things mingled as, if we thought them, our light would perish. But he is in the body of Maleldil and his sins are forgiven. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. -- C.s. Lewis
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Son," said Aslan to the Cabby, "I have known you long. Do you know me? -- C.s. Lewis
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It promotes charity, courage, contentment, and many other evils. -- C.s. Lewis
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Bad laws make hard cases. -- C.s. Lewis
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We in this house are all that is left of Logres. -- C.s. Lewis
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the exacting memory of childhood can discover no flaw - nothing but kindness, gaiety, and good sense. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you have reached your own room, be kind to those Who have chosen
different doors and to those who are still in the hall. -- C.s. Lewis
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The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed. -- C.s. Lewis
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God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us. -- C.s. Lewis
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I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality ... asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me. -- C.s. Lewis
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But the trouble is that what we call "asking God's forgiveness" very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses. -- C.s. Lewis
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...the ugliest things in human nature are perversions of good and innocent things. -- C.s. Lewis
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The best safeguard against bad literature is a full experience of good; just as a real and affectionate acquaintance with honest people gives a better protection against rogues than a habitual distrust of everyone. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it? -- C.s. Lewis
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Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one ... -- C.s. Lewis
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It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a pig satisfied. -- C.s. Lewis
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The fact that you are giving money to charity does not mean that you need
not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. -- C.s. Lewis
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The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight. When you first notice them they have already been going on for sometime. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be. -- C.s. Lewis
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The beauty of life, is that you don't have to be modernly beautiful to live it. -- C.s. Lewis
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The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you live you may yet have good fortune but all the dead are dead alike -- C.s. Lewis
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Earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries'. -- C.s. Lewis
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The truly wide taste in reading is that which enables a man to find something for his needs on the sixpenny tray outside any secondhand bookshop. -- C.s. Lewis
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Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me. -- C.s. Lewis
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You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built. -- C.s. Lewis
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The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you are foe, we do not fear you. If you are friend, your foes will be taught the fear of us. -- C.s. Lewis
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The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become. -- C.s. Lewis
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We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only keep your ears open and your mouth shut and everything will lead you to everything else in the end - ogni -- C.s. Lewis
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Do I hope that if feeling disguises itself as thought I shall feel less? -- C.s. Lewis
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You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, of this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe no angel ever appears in Scripture without exciting terror: -- C.s. Lewis
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What more He may be, we do not know; we know only that He must be more than we can conceive. It is to be expected that His creation should be, in the main, unintelligible to us. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man whose life has been transformed by Christ cannot help but have his worldview show through. -- C.s. Lewis
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Most baffling of all to a modern literalist, the God who seems to live locally in the sky, also made it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man was appointed by God to have dominion over the beasts, and everything a man does to an animal is either a lawful exercise or a sacrilegious abuse of an authority by divine right. -- C.s. Lewis
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We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. -- C.s. Lewis
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Human intellect is incurably abstract. -- C.s. Lewis
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You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter. -- C.s. Lewis
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By repenting, one acknowledges them as sins-therefore not to be repeated. -- C.s. Lewis
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I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you. -- C.s. Lewis
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Often pointed out that bright mornings brought on wet afternoons, and that you can't expect good times to last. -- C.s. Lewis
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Child," said Aslan, "did I not explain to you once before that no one is ever told what might have been? -- C.s. Lewis
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His lips may say the words, but his heart adds, But please don't let it be yet. -- C.s. Lewis
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As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. -- C.s. Lewis
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A spoiled saint, a Pharisee, an inquisitor, or a magician, makes better sport to Hell than a mere common tyrant or debauchee. -- C.s. Lewis
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Life at a vile boarding school is in this way a good preparation for the Christian life, that it teaches one to live by hope. -- C.s. Lewis
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Power to translate is the test of having really understood one's own meaning. -- C.s. Lewis
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But in general, take my advice, when you meet anything that is going to be Human and isn't yet, or used to be Human once and isn't now, or ought to be Human and isn't, you keep your eyes on it and feel for your hatchet. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. -- C.s. Lewis
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And what about you? You must be some kind of beardless dwarf?"
"I'm not a dwarf! I'm a girl. And actually I'm tallest in my class."
"You mean to say, that you're a daughter of Eve?"
"Well my mum's name is Helen ... "
"Y-yes, but, you are in fact ... human? -- C.s. Lewis
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Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is a Christian duty, as you know, for every-one to be as happy as he can. -- C.s. Lewis
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I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christian idea of 'putting on Christ' is the whole of Christianity. -- C.s. Lewis
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We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Here. All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.' -- C.s. Lewis
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Remember, he is not, like you, a pure spirit. Never having been a human (Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's) you don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some journeys take us far from home. Some adventures lead us to our destiny. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have come, said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him. -- C.s. Lewis
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We call bad one who rejects the fruit he is given for the fruit he is expecting or the fruit he was given last time. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only thing Christianity can not be ... is moderately important. -- C.s. Lewis
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Out here, in the cold, with the moon and the huge stars overhead and with kind, merry faces all round them, one couldn't quite believe in Underland. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. -- C.s. Lewis
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They Open A Door And Enter A World -- C.s. Lewis
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A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam. -- C.s. Lewis
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Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are, aren't there, only three things that we can do about death: to desire it, to fear it, or to ignore it. -- C.s. Lewis
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We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism
the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good. -- C.s. Lewis
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If education is beaten by training, civilization dies. -- C.s. Lewis
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And of course it is different; as different as a real thing is from a shadow or as waking life is from a dream. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pity was meant to be a spur that drives joy to help misery. But it can be used the wrong way round. It can be used for a kind of blackmailing. Those who choose misery can hold joy up to ransom, by pity. -- C.s. Lewis
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When I was at school one would have said, 'I swear by the Bible.' But Bibles were not encouraged at Experiment House. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not look sad. We shall meet soon again." "Please, Aslan", said Lucy,"what do you call soon?"
"I call all times soon" said Aslan; and instantly he was vanished away. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man is never so proud as when striking an attitude of humility. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only by our incessant efforts is the demand for infinite, or unrhythmical, change kept up. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is essential of the happy life that a man would have almost no mail. -- C.s. Lewis
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The humblest, and at the same time most balanced and capacious, praised most, while the crank, misfits and malcontents praised least. -- C.s. Lewis
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Fools!" said the man, stamping his foot with rage. "That is the sort of talk that brought me here, and I'd better have been drowned or never born. Do you hear what I say? This is where dreams - dreams, do you understand - come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions. -- C.s. Lewis
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No time for better words, no time to unsay anything.
-Til We Have Faces -- C.s. Lewis
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How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself? -- C.s. Lewis
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Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. -- C.s. Lewis
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He is the self-expression of the Father - what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it. -- C.s. Lewis
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I could mend my soul no more than my face. Unless the gods helped. And why did the gods not help? -- C.s. Lewis
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What can be better than to get out a book on Saturday afternoon and thrust all mundane considerations away till next week. -- C.s. Lewis
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As in arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong; but some answers are much nearer being right than others. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there's a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life. -- C.s. Lewis
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He [The Bent One] has left you this way because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one. -- C.s. Lewis
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In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question. -- C.s. Lewis
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But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, "Courage, dear heart," and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan's, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face. -- C.s. Lewis
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Another little portion of the human heritage has been quietly taken from them before they were old enough to understand. -- C.s. Lewis
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I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading. -- C.s. Lewis
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By mixing a little truth with it they had made their lie far stronger. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is my opinion that a story worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then. -- C.s. Lewis
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Is it rational to believe in a bad God? Anyway, in a God so bad as all that? The Cosmic Sadist, the spiteful imbecile? -- 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
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They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up. But for the last twenty years it has not been hushed up. It has been chattered about all day long. Yet it is still in a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right. -- C.s. Lewis
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You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did. -- C.s. Lewis
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-and when it was over they wished it was going to begin again. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. -- C.s. Lewis
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One is sometimes glad not to be a great theologian; one might easily mistake it for being a good Christian. -- C.s. Lewis
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The point is that for our ancestors, the universe was a picture; for modern physics it is a story. -- C.s. Lewis
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I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment ... -- C.s. Lewis
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God knows our situation; He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them. -- C.s. Lewis
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For images, of the one kind or of the other, will come; we cannot jump off our own shadow. As -- C.s. Lewis
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The descent to hell is easy and those who begin by worshipping power, soon worship evil. -- C.s. Lewis
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What do we really know of other people's souls. Of their struggles, dreams, or tempations. For there is only one soul who we truly do know and thats the ones who's destiny is placed on our own hands -- C.s. Lewis
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We may think God wants actions of a certain kind, but God wants people of a certain kind. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even I never dreamed of Magic like this! -- C.s. Lewis
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My symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am the Queen; I'll kill Orual too. -- C.s. Lewis
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To me, re-reading my favorite books is like spending time with my best friends.
I'd never be satisfied to limit myself to just one experience each with my favorite people. -- C.s. Lewis
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Eros, honoured without reservation and obeyed unconditionally, becomes a demon. -- C.s. Lewis
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Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head, but don't be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud, one is safe from the worst form of pride. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like. -- C.s. Lewis
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No generation can bequeath to its successors what it has not got.'3 -- C.s. Lewis
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Where, except in the present, can the eternal be met? -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard. -- C.s. Lewis
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No story can be devised by the wit of man which cannot be interpreted allegorically by the wit of some other man. -- C.s. Lewis
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Into an allegory a man can put only what he already knows; in a myth he puts what he does not yet know and could not come by in any other way. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sacrifice of selfish privacy which is daily demanded of us is daily repaid a hundredfold in the true growth of personality which the life of the Body encourages. -- C.s. Lewis
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Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours. -- C.s. Lewis
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At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, -- C.s. Lewis
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The whole journey was odd and dream-like
the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can never be really sure of how much you believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life or death to you. -- C.s. Lewis
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The girl's called Jill," said the Owl, as loud as it could. "What's that?" said the Dwarf. "The girls are all killed! I don't believe a word of it. What girls? Who killed 'em? -- C.s. Lewis
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I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms, said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is high time we turned to Grammar now," said Doctor Cornelius, in a loud voice. "Will your Royal Highness be pleased to open Pulverulentus Siccus at the fourth page of his 'Grammatical Garden or the Arbour of Accidence pleasantlie open'd to Tender Wits? -- C.s. Lewis
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I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. -- C.s. Lewis
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would very much like to have followed the first plan: he hated the idea -- C.s. Lewis
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The death of a beloved is an amputation. -- C.s. Lewis
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People shouldn't call for demons unless they really mean what they say. -- C.s. Lewis
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Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good. -- C.s. Lewis
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Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you don't listen to theology, that won't mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones. -- C.s. Lewis
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For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary ... -- C.s. Lewis
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And after all, our mythology may be much nearer to literal truth than we suppose. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our problem is not that we desire too much but too little. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the worst thing about it was that you began to feel as if you had always lived on that ship, in that darkness, and to wonder whether sun and blue skies and wind and birds had not been only a dream. -- C.s. Lewis
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He and all his race showed small and ephemeral against the background of such immeasurable fullness. -- C.s. Lewis
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I wonder if people who asked for God to intervene in our world, really know what they are asking. Will they want to be there when God really does intervene? -- C.s. Lewis
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The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil. -- C.s. Lewis
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God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Where I come from, they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives. -- C.s. Lewis
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The more pride we have, the more other people's pride irritates us -- C.s. Lewis
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We follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't you think a dream would feel shy if it were seen walking about in the waking world? -- C.s. Lewis
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You cannot make men good by law. -- C.s. Lewis
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Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn. -- C.s. Lewis
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Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved. -- C.s. Lewis
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God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five. -- C.s. Lewis
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This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backward . . . was it possibly the root of all evil? -- C.s. Lewis
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You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets! -- C.s. Lewis
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No interviews without appointments except between nine and ten PM on the second Saturdays. -- C.s. Lewis
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But why, ... if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. -- C.s. Lewis
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The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard. -- C.s. Lewis
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If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose. -- C.s. Lewis
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Courage, dear heart. -- C.s. Lewis
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this is a book about something -- C.s. Lewis
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He shows much more of Himself to some people than to others-not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. -- C.s. Lewis
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For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are. Ever -- C.s. Lewis
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I say," said Edmund as they walked away, "I suppose it 'is' all right. I mean, I suppose you can beat him?"
"That's what I'm fighting him to find out," said Peter. -- C.s. Lewis
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The bright side of it is," said Puddleglum, "that if we break our necks getting down the cliff, then we're safe from being drowned in the river. -- C.s. Lewis
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Where, except in uncreated light, can the darkness be drowned? -- C.s. Lewis
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You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity. -- C.s. Lewis
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Die before you die, there is no chance after. -- C.s. Lewis
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Beauty is not democratic; she reveals herself more to the few than to the many ... -- C.s. Lewis
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In your world, I have another name. You should know me by it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Daughter, I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never yet met any such thing as Luck. There is something about all this that I do not understand: but if ever we need to know it, you may be sure that we shall. -- C.s. Lewis
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Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael. -- C.s. Lewis
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For in self-giving, if anywhere, we touch a rhythm not only of all creation but of all being. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pilate was merciful till it became risky. -- C.s. Lewis
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i am a kidnapper -- C.s. Lewis
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If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can make anything by writing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities. -- C.s. Lewis
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I shrank from the faces and forms by which I was surrounded. They were all fixed faces, full not of possibilities but impossibilities, -- C.s. Lewis
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Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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The quickest way you can help him is by going to meet Aslan," said Mr. Beaver, "once he's with us, then we can begin doing things. -- C.s. Lewis
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This must be a simply enormous wardrobe! -- C.s. Lewis
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In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's we do not accept them easily enough. -- C.s. Lewis
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The relief was so great that Eustace almost laughed out loud. He began to feel as if he had fought and killed the dragon instead of merely seeing it die. -- C.s. Lewis
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What we know through laws and general principles is a series of connections. But in order for there to be a real universe the connections must be given something to connect; -- C.s. Lewis
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Anger is the fluid love bleeds when cut. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending. -- C.s. Lewis
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To construct plausible and moving 'other worlds' you must draw upon the only real 'other world' we know, that of the spirit. -- C.s. Lewis
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He first teaches us the power of always trying again. -- C.s. Lewis
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Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers. -- C.s. Lewis
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That is one of the functions of art: to present what the narrow and desperately practical perspectives of real life exclude. -- C.s. Lewis
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Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time. -- C.s. Lewis
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Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be want what, in fact, will not make us happy. -- C.s. Lewis
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The true Christian's nostril is to be continually attentive to the inner cesspool. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means. -- C.s. Lewis
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A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently. -- C.s. Lewis
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Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come. -- C.s. Lewis
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There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. As if the Good Lord had nothing better to do than exist! -- C.s. Lewis
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Child, that is why all the rest are now a horror to her. That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Oh, the fruit is good, but they loath it ever after. -- C.s. Lewis
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We know that men find themselves under a moral law, which they did not make, and cannot quite forget even when they try, and which they know they ought to obey. -- C.s. Lewis
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We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument ... Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege. -- C.s. Lewis
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He produced mainly three results: Hatred, Terror, Adoration. -- C.s. Lewis
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We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We happen to have a body. -- C.s. Lewis
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Total war is the most humane in the long run. -- C.s. Lewis
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God loves us NOT because we're lovable, because He is love. Not because He needs to receive, because He delights to give. -- C.s. Lewis
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We read to know we are not alone. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you find yourself with a desire that no experience in this world can satisfy, then the most probable explanation is that you were made for another world. -- C.s. Lewis
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We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child. -- C.s. Lewis
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People who know a lot of the same things can hardly help talking about them. -- C.s. Lewis
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God can make good use of all that happens, but the loss is real. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us. -- C.s. Lewis
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Life isn't all fricasseed frogs and eel pie. -- C.s. Lewis
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Divine punishment are also mercies. -- C.s. Lewis
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As long as you are proud, you cannot know God. -- C.s. Lewis
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My decision (for Christ) was not so important. I was the object rather than the subject in this affair. I was decided upon. -- C.s. Lewis
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Very few modern people think Friendship a love of comparable value or even a love at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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It (friendship) has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which gives value to survival. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author's mind. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you examined a hundred people who had lost their faith in Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have reasoned out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away? -- C.s. Lewis
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Readers are advised to remember the devil is a liar. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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When you read great literature, you become a thousand men and yet still be yourself. -- C.s. Lewis
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And this new air was so delicious, and all his old life seemed so far away, that he forgot for a moment about his bruises and his aching muscles. -- C.s. Lewis
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But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman. -- C.s. Lewis
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From at least the age of six, romantic longing
Sechnsucht
has played an unusually central part of my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aslan didn't tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he's up, I shouldn't wonder. But that doesn't let us off following the signs. -- C.s. Lewis
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In Science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity does NOT replace the technical. When he tells you to feed the hungry and doesn't give you lessons in cookery. If you want to learn THAT, you must go to a cook rather than a Christian. -- C.s. Lewis
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You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well. -- C.s. Lewis
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Music. A meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience. -- C.s. Lewis
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Prayer is not a machine. It is not magic. It is not advice offered to God. Our act, when we pray, must not, any more than all our other acts, be separated from the continuous act of God Himself, in which alone all finite causes operate. -- C.s. Lewis
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In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself ... I see with a myriad of eyes,but it is still I who see. -- C.s. Lewis
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Infinite hopes - and fears - may both be yours. Be sure that, whatever else you get, you will not get justice." "Are the gods not just?" "Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were? But -- C.s. Lewis
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The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable. -- C.s. Lewis
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To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. -- C.s. Lewis
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The fine flower of unholiness can grow only in the close neighborhood of the Holy. -- C.s. Lewis
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I'm afraid it's not much use to you, Mr. Rumblebuffin.'
Not at all. Not at all.' said the giant politely. 'Never met a nicer hankerchee. -- C.s. Lewis
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Justice means equality for equals, and inequality for unequals. -- C.s. Lewis
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Have fun, even if it's not the same kind of fun everyone else is having. -- C.s. Lewis
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The more dressed up you were to begin with, the worse you look after you've crawled out of a smashed hansom cab and fallen into a muddy brook. -- C.s. Lewis
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God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe it all. If I seem not to, it is only that my joy is too great to let my belief settle itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch. -- C.s. Lewis
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Be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. -- C.s. Lewis
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Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it. -- C.s. Lewis
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If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, you are very conceited indeed. -- C.s. Lewis
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The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey. -- C.s. Lewis
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She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Good and evil are not static; they are dynamic. Each one continually feeds on itself just like compound interest in the bank. Good is always getting better, and evil is always getting worse. -- C.s. Lewis
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When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. -- C.s. Lewis
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Many people think their prayers are never answered because it is the answered ones they forget. -- C.s. Lewis
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The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Our charities should pinch and hamper us. If we live at the same level of affluence as other people who have our level of income, we are probably giving away too little. -- C.s. Lewis
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You know me better than you think, you know, and you shall know me better yet. -- C.s. Lewis
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It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion. -- C.s. Lewis
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they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes. -- C.s. Lewis
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Atheists express their rage against God although in their view He does not exist. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you look upon ham and eggs and lust, you have already committed breakfast in your heart. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am not concerned at present with blame; I am trying to find out truth. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. -- C.s. Lewis
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Narnia. The happy land of Narnia
Narnia of the heathery mountains and the thymy downs, Narnia of the many rivers, the plashing glens, the mossy caverns and the deep forests ringing with the hammers of the Dwarfs ... -- C.s. Lewis
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You see, Aslan didn't tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he's up, I shouldn't wonder. But that doesn't let us off following the signs.
- The Silver Chair -- C.s. Lewis
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There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it. -- C.s. Lewis
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If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic
to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them. -- C.s. Lewis
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You would not have called to me unless I had been calling to you, said the Lion. -- C.s. Lewis
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We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because he was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think you and I ought to publish our letters (they'd be a jolly good book by the way) under the title of lamentations, as we are always jawing about our sorrows. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to. -- C.s. Lewis
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We do know that no person can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved by Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Take from a man his freedom or his goods and you may have taken his innocence, almost his humanity, as well. -- C.s. Lewis
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You are certainly under the guidance of the Holy Ghost or you wouldn't have come where you now are. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh, Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good! -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection -- C.s. Lewis
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You have listened to fears, Child,' said Aslan. 'Come, let me breathe on you. Forget them. Are you brave again? -- C.s. Lewis
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Your Majesty would have a perfect right to strike off his head," said Peridan. "Such an assault as he made puts him on a level with assassins."
"It is very true," said Edmund. "But even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did." And he looked very thoughtful. -- C.s. Lewis
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Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility. -- C.s. Lewis
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If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees. -- C.s. Lewis
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Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. -- C.s. Lewis
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We all agree that forgiveness is a beautiful idea until we have to practice it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every joy is beyond all others. -- C.s. Lewis
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It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ideally, we should like to define a good book as one which 'permits, invites, or compels' good reading -- C.s. Lewis
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In our adversity, God shouts to us. -- C.s. Lewis
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while they had been talking the stars had grown fainter and great gaps of white light were appearing in the greyness of the eastern sky. -- C.s. Lewis
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Father! Can I box him? Please! -- C.s. Lewis
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You see, I don't think age matters so much as people think. Parts of me are still 12 and I think other parts were already 50 when I was 12 ... . -- C.s. Lewis
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War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. -- C.s. Lewis
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We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment. -- C.s. Lewis
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The sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not for you, a son of Adam, to know what faults a star can commit. -- C.s. Lewis
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Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never really was any problem. -- C.s. Lewis
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I pay respect to wisdom not to strength. -- C.s. Lewis
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A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. -- C.s. Lewis
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The whole story, paradoxically enough, strengthens our relish for real life. This excursion into the preposterous sends us back with renewed pleasure to the actual. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is not an optional extra, He's an absolute must! -- C.s. Lewis
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Shalt think otherwise when thou hast a man of thine own, I warrant you,' said the knight, apparently thinking this very funny. -- C.s. Lewis
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I know the two great commandments, and I'd better get on with them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance. -- C.s. Lewis
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Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful. -- C.s. Lewis
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You might say that when two Christians are following Christ together there is not twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but sixteen times as much. -- C.s. Lewis
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You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years. -- C.s. Lewis
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Envy, bleating 'I'm as good as you', is the hotbed of Fascism. -- C.s. Lewis
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The most intense joy, lies not in the having,
but in the desire,
Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal,
Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach ... Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C.S. Lewis -- C.s. Lewis
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Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement. -- C.s. Lewis
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The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Almost the whole of Christian theology could perhaps be deduced from the two facts (a) That men make coarse jokes, and (b) That they feel the dead to be uncanny. The -- C.s. Lewis
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So many things
nay every real thing
is good if only it will be humble and ordinate. -- C.s. Lewis
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If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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It's always winter but it's never Christmas. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity agrees with Dualism that this universe is at war. But it does not think this is a war between independent powers. It thinks it is a civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't really study people; you can only get to know them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity. -- C.s. Lewis
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But Pride always means enmity
it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do not expect old heads on young shoulders. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the Prince stared at her like a man out of his wits. -- C.s. Lewis
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What's done is done. There is no need to speak with Edmond about his past. -- C.s. Lewis
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Day after day there rose a smell which Lucy found very hard to describe: sweet- yes, but not at all sleepy or overpowering, a fresh wild lonely smell that seemed to get into your brain- -- C.s. Lewis
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Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own. -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh Trees, Trees, Trees ... wake. Don't you remember it? Don't you remember me? Dryads and hamadryads, come out, come [out] to me. -- C.s. Lewis
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They would feel more comfortable if only they thought how very much colder it would be later on and farther north; but this didn't cheer them up at -- C.s. Lewis
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If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived. -- C.s. Lewis
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Mathematics effectively began when a few Greek friends got together to talk about numbers and lines and angles. -- C.s. Lewis
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Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. -- C.s. Lewis
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If things are real, they're there all the time. -- C.s. Lewis
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Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness? While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best. -- C.s. Lewis
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The next moment is as much beyond our grasp, and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is as foolish as care for a day in the next thousand years. In neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. -- C.s. Lewis
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the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind. Does -- C.s. Lewis
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You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters. -- C.s. Lewis
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When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift? -- C.s. Lewis
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Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth. -- C.s. Lewis
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He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe) -- C.s. Lewis
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The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aslan's instructions always work; there are no exceptions. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved. -- C.s. Lewis
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And a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed. -- C.s. Lewis
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He does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods; the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted. -- C.s. Lewis
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[Ransom] preferred to work as a volunteer rather than in admitted slavery: and he liked his cooking a good deal more than that of his companions. -- C.s. Lewis
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If one is only to talk from first-hand experience, conversation would be a very poor business. -- C.s. Lewis
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Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done. -- C.s. Lewis
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Freedom always comes with a price. -- C.s. Lewis
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I'd rather be killed fighting for Narnia than grow old and stupid at home and perhaps go about in a bath-chair and then die in the end just the same. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no other day. All days are present now. This moment contains all moments. -- C.s. Lewis
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It was a full moon and, shining on all the snow, it made everything almost as bright as day
only the shadows were rather confusing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every day in a life fills the whole life with expectations and memory. -- C.s. Lewis
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I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important. -- C.s. Lewis
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For the past twenty years you and I have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex -- C.s. Lewis
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Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day. -- C.s. Lewis
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And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every morning we awake and feel the pressures of the day crowding in on us, and we must decide what sort of immortals we wish to be. Perhaps it -- C.s. Lewis
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We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant. -- C.s. Lewis
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He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only. -- C.s. Lewis
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At the end of all things, the blessed will say, 'We never lived anywhere but in heaven.' -- C.s. Lewis
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At the end of things, The Blessed will say, "We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven." And the lost will say, "We were always in Hell." And both will speak truly. -- C.s. Lewis
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Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. -- C.s. Lewis
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I was wondering - I mean - could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. You would not have called me unless I had been calling you. -- C.s. Lewis
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The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation. -- C.s. Lewis
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Even to see her walk across the room is a liberal education. -- C.s. Lewis
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Feeling like the voice she liked best in all the world was calling her name. -- C.s. Lewis
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But who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy -- C.s. Lewis
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The essence of religion, in my view, is the thirst for an end higher than natural ends ... -- C.s. Lewis
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All things are by Him and for Him. He utters Himself also for His own delight and sees that He is good. He is His own begotten and what proceeds from Him is Himself. Blessed be He! -- C.s. Lewis
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The sight of his great valour and of the extremity of his passion might incline her heart to him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others. -- C.s. Lewis
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If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is not a static thing ... but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. -- C.s. Lewis
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But it is in the rooms, not the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. -- C.s. Lewis
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Uncle Andrew, you see, was working with things he did not really understand; most magicians are. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are the things they can't help? -- C.s. Lewis
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I, or any mortal at any time, may be utterly mistaken as to the situation he is really in. -- C.s. Lewis
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You must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. -- C.s. Lewis
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The world was made partly that there may be prayer; partly that our prayers might be answered. -- C.s. Lewis
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Forgiveness does not mean excusing. -- C.s. Lewis
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Beloved," said the Glorious One, "unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek. -- C.s. Lewis
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To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite. -- C.s. Lewis
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Gratitude exclaims ... 'How good of God to give me this.' Adoration says, 'What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!' One's mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun. -- C.s. Lewis
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All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing is wonderful except in the abnormal, and nothing is abnormal until we have grasped the norm. -- C.s. Lewis
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While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is the best. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every poem can be considered in two ways
as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. -- C.s. Lewis
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The duty of planning the morrow's work is today's duty... -- C.s. Lewis
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When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs, intended to do different things. -- C.s. Lewis
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He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. -- C.s. Lewis
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And so take away his work, which was his life [ ... ] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his? -- C.s. Lewis
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The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks -- C.s. Lewis
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Even though Education and all sorts of horrible things are going to happen to me. But you want the story. Well, Corin and I were twins. -- C.s. Lewis
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Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth-for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice-awoke in him. -- C.s. Lewis
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You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. -- C.s. Lewis
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Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Each time you fall He'll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection -- C.s. Lewis
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The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack. -- C.s. Lewis
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A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid. -- C.s. Lewis
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In Gethsemane the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him. It did not. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is very true. But even a traitor may mend. I have known one who did. -- C.s. Lewis
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In civilised life domestic hatred usually expresses itself by saying things which would appear quite harmless on paper (the words are not offensive) but in such a voice, or at such a moment, that they are not far short of a blow in the face. -- C.s. Lewis
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When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you'd been the only man in the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is arrogance in us to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry 'masculine' when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them to describe a man's sensitiveness or tact or tenderness as 'feminine. -- C.s. Lewis
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Take care. It is so easy to break eggs without making omelettes. -- C.s. Lewis
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All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not. -- C.s. Lewis
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The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. -- C.s. Lewis
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We originally meant each to write an excursionary "thriller:" a space-journey [his] and a timejourney (mine) each discovering Myth. -- C.s. Lewis
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A naturalistic Christianity leaves out all that is specifically Christian. -- C.s. Lewis
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History is a story written by the finger of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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My idea of God is a not divine idea. It has to be shattered from time to time. He shatters it Himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of His presence?.. -- C.s. Lewis
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An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am a product [ ... of] endless books. -- C.s. Lewis
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Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man? -- C.s. Lewis
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Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am in love and out of it I will not go. -- C.s. Lewis
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Are you my councilor or my slave, said the witch. -- C.s. Lewis
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We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. -- C.s. Lewis
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The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have read the Aeneid through more often than I have read any long poem. -- C.s. Lewis
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Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon's lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons. -- C.s. Lewis
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Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future. -- C.s. Lewis
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We all have different languages; but we all really mean the same thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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A man can't be always defending the truth; there must be a time to feed on it. -- C.s. Lewis
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I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do. -- C.s. Lewis
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If He, who in Himself can lack nothing, chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we merely say that we are bad, the 'wrath' of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God's goodness. To -- C.s. Lewis
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I seemed to hear God saying, Put down your gun and we'll talk. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sexual appetite, like any other appetite, grows by indulgence -- C.s. Lewis
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If Christianity is only one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. -- C.s. Lewis
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Courage, Brave Heart -- C.s. Lewis
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If you want to know how I felt, imagine your own feelings on waking one morning to find that income tax or unrequited love had somehow vanished from the world. -- C.s. Lewis
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I do wish," said Lucy, "now that we're not thirsty, we could go on feeling as not-hungry as we did when we were thirsty. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan. -- C.s. Lewis
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Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. -- C.s. Lewis
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She felt frightened only for a second. For one thing, the world beneath her was so very far away that it seemed to have nothing to do with her. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief. -- C.s. Lewis
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Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name. -- C.s. Lewis
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There seems to be hardly any one among my acquaintance from whom I have not learned. -- C.s. Lewis
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Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward towards success. -- C.s. Lewis
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The higher the stakes, the greater the temptation to lose your temper. -- C.s. Lewis
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Reason may win truths; without Faith she will retain them just so long as Satan pleases. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth -- C.s. Lewis
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In such a fearful world, we need a fearless church -- C.s. Lewis
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I must say my prayers today whether I feel devout or not; but that is only as I must learn my grammar if I am ever to read the poets. -- C.s. Lewis
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I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. -- C.s. Lewis
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All schools both here and in America should teach far fewer subjects far better. -- C.s. Lewis
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The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior. -- C.s. Lewis
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Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything. -- C.s. Lewis
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But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes. -- C.s. Lewis
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This moment contains all moments. -- C.s. Lewis
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When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind. -- C.s. Lewis
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God has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. -- C.s. Lewis
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My own eyes are not enough for me; I will see through those of others. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can give the Devil too much or too little attention. -- C.s. Lewis
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There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven, but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have desired anything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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We had better share our bewilderments. By hiding them from each other we should not hide them from ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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What one must not do is to rule out the supernatural as the one impossible explanation. -- C.s. Lewis
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The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think. -- C.s. Lewis
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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. -- C.s. Lewis
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Men do not long continue to think what they have forgotten how to say. -- C.s. Lewis
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I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death. -- C.s. Lewis
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Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God. -- C.s. Lewis
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We may note in passing that He (Jesus) was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects - Hatred - Terror - Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild admiration. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end. -- C.s. Lewis
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Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, 'There she goes again. What's the matter with her? -- C.s. Lewis
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But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Friends are seldom found; they are made. -- C.s. Lewis
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Theology offers you a working arrangement, which leaves the scientist free to continue his experiments and the Christian to continue his prayers. -- C.s. Lewis
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We debated whether the future was like a line you can't see or like a line that is not yet drawn. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the end that Face which is the delight or terror of the universe must be turned upon each of us either with one expression or with the other, either conferring glory inexpressible or inflicting shame that can never be cured or disguised. -- C.s. Lewis
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Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but peace in difficulties. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are mistaken when we compare war with "normal life." Life has never been normal. Even those periods which we think most tranquil, like the nineteenth century, turn out, on closer inspection, to be full of crises, alarms, difficulties, emergencies. -- C.s. Lewis
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Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. -- C.s. Lewis
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The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. -- C.s. Lewis
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Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.
Actually this quote doesn't sound like C.S. Lewis at all. Can anyone provide a source? -- C.s. Lewis
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It was all there in that little disc-London, Athens, Jerusalem, Shakespeare. There everyone had lived and everything had happened; and there, presumably, his pack was still lying in the porch of an empty house near Sterk. -- C.s. Lewis
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Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. -- C.s. Lewis
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Whatever we do, don't let's have any running. Especially not before supper; and not too soon after it neither. -- C.s. Lewis
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Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny. -- C.s. Lewis
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Watchin' and listenin' is the thing at present; not talking. -- C.s. Lewis
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That fierce imprisonment in the self is but the obverse of the self-giving which is absolute reality. -- C.s. Lewis
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Most of us are not really approaching the subject [scriptures] in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it [them] in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party. -- C.s. Lewis
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...for when a thing is enclosed, the mind does not willingly regard it as common. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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I wonder do the gods know what it feels like to be a man. -- C.s. Lewis
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If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know. -- C.s. Lewis
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But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so: and at that stage lumps on the shoulders- no one could tell by looking at them that they are going to be wings ... -- C.s. Lewis
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I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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We come to Scripture not to learn a subject but to steep ourselves in a person. -- 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.s. Lewis
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Thanks for my life, my cure, my breakfast - and my lesson. -- C.s. Lewis
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In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. -- C.s. Lewis
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The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye) ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Teach him to call it 'real life' and don't let him ask what he means by 'real'. -- C.s. Lewis
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To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it. -- C.s. Lewis
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Well!' said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. 'This is just what I needed. If these chaps don't teach me to take a serious view of life, I don't know what will. -- C.s. Lewis
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What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations. -- C.s. Lewis
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I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked. -- C.s. Lewis
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I pray because I can't help myself ... -- C.s. Lewis
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There was a time in childhood when I didn't yet know I was ugly. Then there was a time when I believed as girls do - and as Batta was always telling m - that I could make it more tolerable by this or that done to my clothes or my hair. Now, I chose to be veiled. -- C.s. Lewis
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Little from you is really a bit too much -- C.s. Lewis
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Oh-my-Father-and-oh-the-delight-of-my-eyes," began the young man, muttering the words very quickly and sulkily and not at all as if the Tisroc were the delight of his eyes. -- C.s. Lewis
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The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. -- C.s. Lewis
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The truth is not that we need the critics in order to enjoy the authors, but that we need the authors in order to enjoy the critics. -- C.s. Lewis
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The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong. -- C.s. Lewis
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A promise must be about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling a certain way. -- C.s. Lewis
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In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. -- C.s. Lewis
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Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are ... -- C.s. Lewis
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I do not think either virginity or old age contemptible, and some of the shrewdest minds I have met inhabited the bodies of old maids. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our Pupils are fit to become our Critics & Rivals -- C.s. Lewis
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One of the most dangerous of literary ventures is the little, shy, unimportant heroine whom none of the other characters value. The danger is that your readers may agree with the other characters. -- C.s. Lewis
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We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals ... The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man. -- C.s. Lewis
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I say, Peter," whispered Edmund. "Look at those carvings on the walls. Don't they look old? And yet we're older than that. When we were last here, they hadn't been made."
"Yes," said Peter. "That makes one think. -- C.s. Lewis
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Goodness gracious me! -- C.s. Lewis
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Man is to be understood only in his relation to God. -- C.s. Lewis
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To be religious is to have one's attention fixed on God and on one's neighbour in relation to God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations. -- C.s. Lewis
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What God does for us, He does in us. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is better to forget about yourself altogether. -- C.s. Lewis
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Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony. -- C.s. Lewis
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A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion. -- C.s. Lewis
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I saw in a flash that if I shrank from this there would at once be less Queen and more Orual in me. -- C.s. Lewis
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And the seriousness with which the other party takes my words always raises the doubt whether I have taken them seriously enough myself. -- C.s. Lewis
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They wanted to be nouns, but they were, and eternally must be, mere adjectives. -- C.s. Lewis
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Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it. -- C.s. Lewis
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The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of imagining a new primary colour,or, indeed, of creating a new sun and a new sky for it to move in. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the Divine Substance ... -- C.s. Lewis
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I don't believe your theory that "readers never notice that sort of thing." I'm sure I should. -- C.s. Lewis
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After all, real things are not simple. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who tread 'adult' as a term of approval cannot hope to be considered adult themselves. When I became a man I put away childish things, along with the desire to be very grown up. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. -- C.s. Lewis
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Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. -- C.s. Lewis
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The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not excess of thought but defect of fertile and generous emotion that marks them out. Their heads are no bigger than the ordinary: it is the atrophy of te chest beneath that makes them seem so. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you thirst you may drink. -- C.s. Lewis
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She stayed behind because she thought it would be worthwhile trying the door of the wardrobe, even though she felt almost sure that it would be locked. To her surprise it opened quite easily ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. -- C.s. Lewis
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We have only got as far as a Somebody or Something behind the Moral Law. We are not taking anything from the Bible or the Churches, we are trying to see what we can find out about this Somebody on our own steam. -- C.s. Lewis
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We only learn to behave ourselves in the presence of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. -- C.s. Lewis
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If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful. -- C.s. Lewis
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The game is to have them all running about with fire extinguishers when there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under. -- C.s. Lewis
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If there ever was a time that nothing existed, then nothing would exist now -- C.s. Lewis
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Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. -- C.s. Lewis
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I am often, I believe, praying for others when I should be doing things for them. It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see him. -- C.s. Lewis
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He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. -- C.s. Lewis
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We want the Church to be small not only that fewer men may know the Enemy but also that those who do may acquire the uneasy intensity and the defensive self-righteousness of a secret society or a clique. -- C.s. Lewis
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Alone into the alone. -- C.s. Lewis
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Our problem with desire is that we want too little. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help? -- C.s. Lewis
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Jesus Christ did not say, 'Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right.' -- C.s. Lewis
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It was not for societies or states, that Christ died, but for men. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you do not listen to theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones! -- C.s. Lewis
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The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven. -- C.s. Lewis
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Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you? -- C.s. Lewis
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When we are lost in the woods, the sight of a signpost is a great matter. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not. -- C.s. Lewis
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Don't you mind," said Puddleglum. "There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant king caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this. -- C.s. Lewis
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We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold. -- C.s. Lewis
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[Something] does not rise to the dignity of error. -- C.s. Lewis
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The history of literature is very far from being one of simple progress. -- C.s. Lewis
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Aslan" said Lucy "you're bigger".
"That is because you are older, little one" answered he.
"Not because you are?"
"I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger". -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone who believes in God must therefore admit (quite apart from the question of prayer) that God has not chosen to write the whole of history with His own hand. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master ... The quality that had enchanted me in his imaginative works turned out to be the quality of the real universe, the divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic reality in which we all live. -- C.s. Lewis
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We cannot fully understand the relations of time and choice until we are beyond both. -- C.s. Lewis
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The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion. -- C.s. Lewis
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Courage, friends,' came Prince Rilian's voice. 'Whether we live or die Aslan will be our good lord. -- C.s. Lewis
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Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure. -- C.s. Lewis
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Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either. -- C.s. Lewis
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The stars in their courses were fighting against Weston. -- C.s. Lewis
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That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves part of eternal reality. -- C.s. Lewis
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Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect. -- C.s. Lewis
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What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it. -- C.s. Lewis
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A sign of a culture that has lost its faith - Moral collapse follows upon spiritual collapse. -- C.s. Lewis
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He had not yet learned that sometimes your reward for doing one task well is to be set with a harder and better one. -- C.s. Lewis
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Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers. -- C.s. Lewis
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For He (God) seems to do nothing of himself which He can possibly delegate to His creatures. -- C.s. Lewis
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People blush at praise
not only praise of their bodies, but praise of anything that is theirs. -- C.s. Lewis
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I was not born to be free
I was born to adore and obey. -- C.s. Lewis
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All right, I said murder and I'll say it again as often as I like, so keep your hair on... -- C.s. Lewis
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If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing. It -- C.s. Lewis
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Things like Do Not Steal were, I think, hammered into boys' heads a good deal harder in those days than they are now. Still, we can never be certain. -- C.s. Lewis
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Discussions usually separate us; actions sometimes unite us. -- C.s. Lewis
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We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed. -- C.s. Lewis
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...The "democratic spirit"... [or the campaign to make everyone the same] leads to a nation without great men, a nation mainly of subliterates, full of the cocksureness which flattery breeds on ignorance, and quick to snarl or whimper at the first hint of criticism. -- C.s. Lewis
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Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? 'Best -- C.s. Lewis
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The incalculable winds of fantasy and music and poetry, the mere face of a girl, the song of a bird, or the sight of a horizon, are always blowing evil's whole structure away. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are ready to turn and twist the facts until they bear no resemblance to the original thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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I was with book, as a woman is with child. -- C.s. Lewis
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By remembering it too often I have blurred the memory itself. -- C.s. Lewis
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Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy. -- C.s. Lewis
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Be comforted, small one, in your smallness. He lays no merit on you. Receive and be glad. -- C.s. Lewis
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Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with. -- C.s. Lewis
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Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt. -- C.s. Lewis
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A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems. -- C.s. Lewis
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When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on. If -- C.s. Lewis
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The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition. -- C.s. Lewis
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By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets. -- C.s. Lewis
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If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about. -- C.s. Lewis
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This shame has nothing to do with He or She. It's the being mortal - how shall I say it? ... insufficient. -- C.s. Lewis
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A noble hunger, long unsatisfied, met at last its proper food. -- C.s. Lewis
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I see you are an idiot, whatever else you may be... -- C.s. Lewis
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the devil loves 'curing' a small fault by giving you a great one. -- C.s. Lewis
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I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of hell are locked on the inside. -- C.s. Lewis
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A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. -- C.s. Lewis
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The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that. -- C.s. Lewis
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For the critics who think Chesterton frivolous or 'paradoxical' I have to work hard to feel even pity; sympathy is out of the question. -- 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. -- C.s. Lewis
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Please will you do my job for me. -- C.s. Lewis
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Would you think I was joking if I said that you can put a clock back, and that if the clock is wrong it is often a very sensible thing to do? -- C.s. Lewis
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There is no use saying you chose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up. -- C.s. Lewis
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We can face things which we know to be dangerous if they don't look or sound too dangerous; our real trouble is often with things we know to be safe but which look dreadful. -- C.s. Lewis
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Come, live with me and you'll know me. -- C.s. Lewis
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He wants each man, in the long run, to be able to recognise all creatures (even himself) as glorious and excellent things. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is a dreadful truth that the state of having to depend solely on God is what we all dread most ... It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time. -- C.s. Lewis
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Myth is the isthmus which connects the peninsular world of thought with that vast continent we really belong to. It is not, like truth, abstract; nor is it, like direct experience, bound to the particular. -- C.s. Lewis
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If God is wiser that we His judgement must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil. -- C.s. Lewis
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In a sense it (Christianity) creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteousness and loving. -- C.s. Lewis
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In a sense, [Christianity] creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless, side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving. -- C.s. Lewis
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It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's. -- C.s. Lewis
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Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. -- C.s. Lewis
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He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart -- C.s. Lewis
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If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different. -- C.s. Lewis
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Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words. -- C.s. Lewis
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God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. -- C.s. Lewis
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We do not want to merely "see" beauty. We want to be united with it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it. -- C.s. Lewis
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The idea which ... shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience. -- C.s. Lewis
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Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules. -- C.s. Lewis
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Jesus was either a Liar, a Lunatic, or Lord -- C.s. Lewis
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Jesus Christ was either a liar, a lunatic, or He was who He said He was -- C.s. Lewis
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God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker. -- C.s. Lewis
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If I could remember their singing and write down the notes, no man who read that score would ever grow sick or old. -- C.s. Lewis
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No warrior scolds. Courteous words or else hard knocks are his only language. -- C.s. Lewis
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She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is not enough to want to get rid of one's sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins. -- C.s. Lewis
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The man in Christ rose again, not only the God. -- C.s. Lewis
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It must be remembered that no art lives by nature, only by acts of voluntary attention on the part of human individuals. When these are not made it ceases to exist. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is someone I accept even though I do not approve of all he does ... and that someone is me -- C.s. Lewis
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Authority, reason, experience; on these three, mixed in varying proportions all our knowledge depends. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles. -- C.s. Lewis
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For it is a dreadful truth that the state of (as you say) 'having to depend solely on God' is what we all dread most. -- C.s. Lewis
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All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everyone will have noticed how the Old Testament seems at times to ignore our conception of the individual. -- C.s. Lewis
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I enjoy writing fiction more than writing anything else. Wouldn't anyone? -- C.s. Lewis
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A man ... can find comfort in words coming out of his own mouth. -- C.s. Lewis
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Why, if you are interested in the country only for the sake of painting it, you'll never learn to see the country. -- C.s. Lewis
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If there's anyone who can appear before Aslan without their knees knocking, they're either braver than most, or else just silly. -- C.s. Lewis
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The pleasure of novelty is by its very nature more subject than any other to the laws of diminishing returns. -- C.s. Lewis
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I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards. -- C.s. Lewis
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The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story. -- C.s. Lewis
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Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Holiness of God is something more and other than moral perfection: His claim upon us is something more and other than the claim of moral duty. -- C.s. Lewis
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She had been a great lady, wise and gracious and happy. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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If war is ever lawful, then peace is sometimes sinful. -- C.s. Lewis
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The holier a man becomes, the more he mourns over the unholiness which remains in him. -- C.s. Lewis
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The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.' -- C.s. Lewis
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They stormed and jeered at one another in long meaningless words of about twenty syllables each. -- C.s. Lewis
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Put first things first and second things are thrown in. Put second things first and you lose both first and second things. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is hardly complimentary to God that we should choose him as an alternative to hell. -- C.s. Lewis
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Eustace stood with his heart beating terribly, hoping and hoping that he would be brave. -- C.s. Lewis
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You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third. -- C.s. Lewis
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The moment good taste knows itself, some of its goodness is lost. -- C.s. Lewis
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We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely -- C.s. Lewis
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I do mean that wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way. -- C.s. Lewis
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If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were educated. But a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing is yet in its true form. -- C.s. Lewis
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True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty. -- C.s. Lewis
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For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.
- Aslan, The Magician's Nephew -- C.s. Lewis
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I object to that remark very strongly!
- The Magician's Nephew -- C.s. Lewis
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Puddleglum's my name. But it doesn't matter if you forget it. I can always tell you again. -- C.s. Lewis
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Youth and age touch only the surface of our lives. -- C.s. Lewis
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Well,' said Ransom, 'if it is a delusion, it's a pretty stubborn one. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man. -- C.s. Lewis
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When first things are put first, second things are not suppressed but increased. -- C.s. Lewis
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God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair? -- C.s. Lewis
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Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. -- C.s. Lewis
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Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit ... -- C.s. Lewis
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Joy is the serious business of heaven. -- C.s. Lewis
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Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality. -- C.s. Lewis
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Lewis encourages his cancer-stricken and temporarily depressed wife that uncertainty rather than hopelessness is our cross. -- C.s. Lewis
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And when they looked at her they thought that they had never before known what beauty meant. -- C.s. Lewis
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Laziness means more work in the long run. -- C.s. Lewis
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Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost. -- C.s. Lewis
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If there is a wasp in the room, I'd like to be able to see it. -- C.s. Lewis
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But I cannot tell that to this old sinner, and I cannot comfort him either; he has made himself unable to hear my voice. -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe that there are too many practitioners in the church, who are not believers. -- C.s. Lewis
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The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. -- C.s. Lewis
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into Narnia at the very beginning. You know that every traitor belongs to me as my lawful prey and that for every treachery I have a right to a kill." "Oh," said Mr. Beaver. "So -- C.s. Lewis
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We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties. -- C.s. Lewis
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'Useful,' and 'necessity' was always 'the tyrant's plea'. -- C.s. Lewis
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By gum,' said Digory, 'Don't I just wish I was big enough to punch your head! -- C.s. Lewis
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If on such grounds, or on better ones, we follow the course in which humanity has been led, and become Christians, we then have the 'Problem of Pain -- C.s. Lewis
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Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive. -- C.s. Lewis
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He had never dreamed that the country of which she would make him king (king in name but really a slave) was his own country. -- C.s. Lewis
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But fie on gravity! -- C.s. Lewis
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The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Tea should be taken in solitude. -- C.s. Lewis
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If we continue to make moral judgements (and whatever we say shall in fact continue) then we must believe that the conscience of man is not a product of nature. -- C.s. Lewis
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Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. -- C.s. Lewis
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I desired dragons with a profound desire. -- C.s. Lewis
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And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things they say
even their looks
will let the secret out. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need forgiveness. -- C.s. Lewis
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If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females - and there is more in that than you might suppose. -- C.s. Lewis
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Always winter but never Christmas. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them. -- C.s. Lewis
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Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. -- C.s. Lewis
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When I'm older I'll understand" said Lucy, " I am older and I don't think I want to understand", replied Edmund -- C.s. Lewis
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We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, and intellectually. We need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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Pleasure that is its own pursuit is always bad pleasure. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity is a fighting religion. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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Aunt Letty was a very tough old lady: aunts often were in those days. -- C.s. Lewis
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One of the Sons of Adam killed him. -- C.s. Lewis
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You had nothing to say about it and yet made the nothing up into words. -- C.s. Lewis
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Unless human reasoning is valid no science can be true. -- C.s. Lewis
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The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably). -- C.s. Lewis
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I don't want him to live forever, and I know that he's not going to live forever whether I want him to or not. -- C.s. Lewis
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Is there any possibility of getting the super Welfare State's honey and avoiding the sting? -- C.s. Lewis
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We who defend Christianity find ourselves constantly opposed not by the irreligion of our headers but by their real religion. -- C.s. Lewis
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We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented? -- C.s. Lewis
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As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.' -- C.s. Lewis
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More like the real thing,' said the lord Digory softly. -- C.s. Lewis
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The grand point is not to wear the garb, nor use the brogue of religion, but to process the life of God within, and feel and think as Jesus would have done because of that inner life. Small is the value of extended religion, unless it is the outcome of a life within. -- C.s. Lewis
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Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility ... youth's characteristic chronological snobbery. -- C.s. Lewis
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I daren't come and drink," said Jill.
Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion.
Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer."I suppose I must go and look for another stream then."
There is no other stream," said the Lion. -- C.s. Lewis
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To be greatly and effectively wicked a man needs some virtue. What -- C.s. Lewis
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He bawled up at the giant, 'Hi! You up there ... what's your name?'
Giant Rumblebuffin, if you please, your honor ... -- C.s. Lewis
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You can begin as if nothing had ever gone wrong. White as snow. -- C.s. Lewis
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I don't pray so that I can change God. I pray so that God can change me. -- C.s. Lewis
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Perhaps in the soul, as in the soil, those growths that show the brightest colours and put forth the most overpowering smell have not always the deepest root. -- C.s. Lewis
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Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice. -- C.s. Lewis
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If the world is meaningless, then so are we; if we mean something, we do not mean alone. -- C.s. Lewis
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Inner silence is for our race difficult to achieve. -- C.s. Lewis
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The more he fears, the more he'll hate. -- C.s. Lewis
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The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination -- C.s. Lewis
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No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.. -- C.s. Lewis
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Have you pen and ink, Master Doctor?"
"A scholar is never without them, your majesty," answered Doctor Cornelius. -- C.s. Lewis
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Everything that is not eternal is worthless in eternity. -- C.s. Lewis
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You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another. -- C.s. Lewis
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If crime and disease are to be regarded as the same thing, it follows that any state of mind which our masters choose to call 'disease' can be treated as a crime and compulsorily cured. -- C.s. Lewis
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I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse ... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil. -- C.s. Lewis
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Heaven will display far more variety than Hell. -- C.s. Lewis
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The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four. -- C.s. Lewis
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I know no promise that He will accept a deliberate compromise. -- C.s. Lewis
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The spreading blackness was not a cloud at all: it was simply emptiness. The black part of the sky was the part in which there were no stars left. All the stars were falling: Aslan had called them home. The -- C.s. Lewis
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For the mention of Aslan gave him a mysterious and horrible feeling just as it gave the others a mysterious and lovely feeling. Just -- C.s. Lewis
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Aslan: You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are. -- C.s. Lewis
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Imagine yourself as a living house. -- C.s. Lewis
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Odd, the way the less the Bible is read the more it is translated -- C.s. Lewis
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You couldn't expect good times to last. -- C.s. Lewis
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I don't want to hold you hand! -- C.s. Lewis
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The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. -- C.s. Lewis
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I gave in, and admitted that God was God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Those who run first do not always run last, -- C.s. Lewis
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I believe this not in the sense that it is part of my creed, but in the sense that it is one of my opinions. My religion would not be in ruins if this opinion were shown to be false. -- C.s. Lewis
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We were made to be neither cerebral men nor visceral men, but Men. Not beasts nor angels but Men - things at once rational and animal. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the knowledge of sleep. -- C.s. Lewis
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I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us. -- C.s. Lewis
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Exactly as he spoke, Polly's hand went out to touch one of the rings. And immediately, without a flash or a noise or a warning of any sort, there was no Polly. -- C.s. Lewis
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A moderated religion is as good for us as no religion at all - and more amusing. -- C.s. Lewis
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You have gone into the Temple ... and found Him, as always, there. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the science, Evolution is a theory about changes; in the myth it is a fact about improvements. -- C.s. Lewis
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With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere. -- C.s. Lewis
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A sense of great masses moving at visionary speeds, of giants dancing, of eternal sorrows consoled, of he knew not what and yet he had always known, awoke in him with the very first bass of the deep-mouthed dirge, and bowed down his spirit as if the gate of heaven had opened before him. -- C.s. Lewis
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God is not merely good, but goodness; goodness is not merely divine, but God. -- C.s. Lewis
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There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit. -- C.s. Lewis
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To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature. If we cannot bear the second well, that evil is ours. -- C.s. Lewis
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The old field of space, time, matter, and the senses is to be weeded, dug, and sown for a new crop. We may be tired of that old field: God is not. -- C.s. Lewis
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Badness is only spoiled goodness. -- C.s. Lewis
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His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth, which is just what we want. -- C.s. Lewis
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I naturally loathe nearly all hymns -- C.s. Lewis
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Our Heavenly Father has provided many delightful inns for us along our journey, but he takes great care to see that we do not mistake any of them for home. -- C.s. Lewis
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If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Christianity has not message for those who do not realize they are sinners. -- C.s. Lewis
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Peter leaned forward, put his arms round the beast and kissed the furry head: it wasn't a girlish thing for him to do, because he was the High King. -- C.s. Lewis
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Yes," said Queen Lucy. "In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world. -- C.s. Lewis
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Necessity may not be the opposite of freedom, and perhaps a man is most free when, instead of producing motives, he could only say, I am what I do. -- C.s. Lewis
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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
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That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God. -- C.s. Lewis
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They tell you how the demands of this law, which you and I cannot meet, have been met on our behalf, how God Himself becomes a man to save man from the disapproval of God. -- C.s. Lewis
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Regarding the debate about faith and works: It's like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important. -- C.s. Lewis
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I became my own only when I gave myself to Another. -- C.s. Lewis
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When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over -- C.s. Lewis
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We need to keep our eyes and ears open. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is often little things that are hardest to stand. -- C.s. Lewis
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In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen. -- C.s. Lewis
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The other view is the religious view.* According to it, what is behind the universe is more like a mind than it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And -- C.s. Lewis
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When all the suns and nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. -- C.s. Lewis
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For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means ... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence. -- C.s. Lewis
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To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this. -- C.s. Lewis
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Until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I'm going to have to do this sort of thing. -- C.s. Lewis
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But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it [repent]. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes. -- C.s. Lewis
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Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention
a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit? -- C.s. Lewis
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Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance. -- C.s. Lewis
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It's so large"
"It's the world dear, did you think it'd be small?"
"smaller -- C.s. Lewis
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I am almost inclined to set it up as a canon that a children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story. -- C.s. Lewis
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Wood between the Worlds, -- C.s. Lewis
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(By the way, if you are going to read this story at all, and if you don't know already, you had better get it into your head that the left of a ship when you are looking ahead, is port, and the right is starboard.) All -- C.s. Lewis
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We appear to be saying something very important about
something: and actually we are only saying something about our own feelings. -- C.s. Lewis
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The longer we stay in Hell, the more we become attached to it. -- C.s. Lewis
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All names will soon be restored to their proper owners. -- C.s. Lewis
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The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite. -- C.s. Lewis
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The literary man re-reads, other men simply read. -- C.s. Lewis
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The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of. -- C.s. Lewis
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Wouldn't he know without being asked?' said Polly.
'I've no doubt he would,' said the Horse (still with his mouth full). 'But I've a sort of an idea he likes to be asked. -- C.s. Lewis
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It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one. -- C.s. Lewis
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The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts. -- C.s. Lewis
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The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation. -- C.s. Lewis
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Further up and further in -- C.s. Lewis
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Bent creatures are full of fears -- C.s. Lewis
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Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue. -- C.s. Lewis
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Never exaggerate. Never say more than you really mean. -- C.s. Lewis
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But however happy you are feeling, you can't talk with your mouth full of snow. -- C.s. Lewis
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Actually it seems to me that one can hardly say anything either bad enough or good enough about life. -- C.s. Lewis
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We are a little land. And little lands on the borders of a great empire were always hateful to the lords of the great empire. He longs to blot them out, gobble them up. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is much less important that the doctrine itself should be fully comprehensible. We believe that the sun is in the sky at midday in summer not because we can clearly see the sun (in fact, we cannot) but because we can see everything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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Their scepticism about values is on the surface: it is for use on other people's values; about the values current in their own set they are not nearly sceptical enough. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is very foolish to shut oneself into any wardrobe. -- C.s. Lewis
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IF ONE COULD RUN WITHOUT GETTING tired, I don't think one would often want to do anything else. -- C.s. Lewis
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You can make anything by writing.-
You are never too old to set a new goal or dream a new dream. -- C.s. Lewis
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Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly. -- C.s. Lewis
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Man does not have a soul. He is a soul. He has a body. -- C.s. Lewis
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It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. -- C.s. Lewis
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Evil can be undone, but it cannot "develop" into good. -- C.s. Lewis
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This didn't seem to have anything to do with Old Narnia, which was what Caspian really wanted to hear about, but getting up in the middle of the night is always interesting and he was moderately pleased. -- C.s. Lewis
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The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said -- C.s. Lewis
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For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition. -- C.s. Lewis
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The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own. -- C.s. Lewis
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There is only one way fit for a man
Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand. -- C.s. Lewis
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The moment you say that one set of moral ideas can be better than another, you are, in fact, measuring them both by a standard, saying that one of them conforms to that standard more nearly than the other. -- C.s. Lewis
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We have nothing, if not belief -- C.s. Lewis
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She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances. That is to say, if evil is present, pain at recognition of the evil, being a kind of knowledge, is relatively good. -- C.s. Lewis
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When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place. -- C.s. Lewis
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No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.' -- C.s. Lewis
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Reality, in fact, is always something you couldn't have guessed. That's one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It's a religion you couldn't have guessed. -- C.s. Lewis
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They say that a shared sorrow draws people closer together; I can hardly believe that it often has that effect when those who share it are of widely different ages. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only real risk passes the reality of faith. -- C.s. Lewis
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You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy. -- C.s. Lewis
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All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. -- C.s. Lewis
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But even a traitor may mend. I have known one that did. -- C.s. Lewis
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We do not see into men's hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. -- C.s. Lewis
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He raised his head and roared, "Now it is time!" then louder, "Time!"; then so loud that is could have shaken the stars, "TIME. -- C.s. Lewis
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Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. -- C.s. Lewis
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According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. -- C.s. Lewis
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What may be myth in one world may always be fact in some other. -- C.s. Lewis
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It matters enormously if I alienate anyone from the truth. -- C.s. Lewis
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The miracle of the Resurrection, and the theology of that miracle, comes first: the biography comes later as a comment on it. -- C.s. Lewis
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To fight in another man's armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting. -- C.s. Lewis
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Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. To the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful. -- C.s. Lewis
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A certain shame or bashfulness attached itself to whatever one deeply and privately enjoyed. -- C.s. Lewis
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Men are not angered by mere misfortune but by misfortune conceived as injury. And the sense of injury depends on the feeling that a legitimate claim has been denied. -- C.s. Lewis
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To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert. -- C.s. Lewis
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Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible. -- C.s. Lewis
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We meet no ordinary people in our lives. -- C.s. Lewis
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The right direction leads not only to peace but to knowledge. -- C.s. Lewis
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Unsatisfactory answers do not become satisfactory by being tentative. -- C.s. Lewis
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Once there were four children -- C.s. Lewis
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We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort. -- C.s. Lewis
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The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is. -- C.s. Lewis
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If nothing in this world satisfies me, perhaps it is because I was made for another world. -- C.s. Lewis
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A society in which conjugal infidelity is tolerated must always be in the long run a society adverse to women. -- C.s. Lewis
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Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good. -- C.s. Lewis
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All agents' here includes God Himself. -- C.s. Lewis
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There seems no plan because it is all plan. -- C.s. Lewis
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The very words repentance, regeneration, the New Man, suggest something very different. Some tendencies in each natural man may have to be simply rejected. -- C.s. Lewis
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To move with the times is, of course, to go where all times go. -- C.s. Lewis
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Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like,' said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use. -- C.s. Lewis
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Of all bad men religious bad men are the worst. -- C.s. Lewis
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The loves prove that they are unworthy to take the place of God by the fact that they cannot even remain themselves and do what they promise to do without God's help. -- C.s. Lewis
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As long as he does not convert it into action, it does not matter how much he thinks about this new repentance. -- C.s. Lewis
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The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded. -- C.s. Lewis
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There are dozens of ways to give people a bad time if you are in your own home and they are only visitors. -- C.s. Lewis
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If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary. -- C.s. Lewis
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Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived. -- C.s. Lewis
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Who will take medicine unless he knows he is in the grip of disease? -- C.s. Lewis
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I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. -- C.s. Lewis
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Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people -- C.s. Lewis
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But battles are ugly when women fight. And -- C.s. Lewis
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Fellows of colleges do not always find money matters easy to understand: if they did, they would probably not have been the sort of men who become Fellows of colleges. -- C.s. Lewis
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And of course, the more enchanted you get, the more you feel that you are not enchanted at all -- C.s. Lewis
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If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world. -- C.s. Lewis
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But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves. -- C.s. Lewis
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Bulgy Bears," said -- C.s. Lewis
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For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait. -- C.s. Lewis
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Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. -- C.s. Lewis
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Length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery. -- C.s. Lewis
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For to be afraid of oneself is the last horror. But, -- C.s. Lewis
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Easy in but not easily out, as the lobster said in the lobster pot! -- C.s. Lewis
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Most people don't need to be taught, they need only to be reminded -- C.s. Lewis
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The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't. -- C.s. Lewis
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If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves. -- C.s. Lewis
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it is I, I myself, who turn from the good expected to the given good. Out of my own heart I do it. One can conceive a heart which did not: which clung to the good it had first thought of and turned the good which was given it into no good." "I -- C.s. Lewis
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It is difficult to assign to instinct our attitude towards an object which exists only for reflective men. -- C.s. Lewis
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Young men are supposed to think themselves immortal, but the subject is not very often out of my mind for a long time together. -- C.s. Lewis
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One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself. -- C.s. Lewis
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You keep a grip of my heelstrong>sstrong>, Pole, and Scrubb would hold on to yourstrong>sstrong>. The we'll all be comfortable. -- C.s. Lewis
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You keep a grip of my heels, Pole, and Scrubb would hold <>ong>onong> to yours. The we'll all be comfortable. -- C.s. Lewis