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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.
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'A Reply to Professor Haldane' (1946), published posthumously in Of Other Worlds: Essays and Stories (1966)
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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.
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Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
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Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: “What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
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If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were precisely those who thought most of the next. It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this.
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No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.
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No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
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We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
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You could send your soul after the good you had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other.
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I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
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Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
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Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
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There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
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You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
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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.
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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'.
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Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.
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Alas," said Aslan, shaking his head. "It will. Things always work according to their nature. She has won her heart's desire; she has unwearying strength and endless days like a goddess. But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
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The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
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Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
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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. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
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Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage.
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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.