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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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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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But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
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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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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.
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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.
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Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
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Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
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A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
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We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. They they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.
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Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
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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.
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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.
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Here the whole world (stars, water, air, And field, and forest, as they were Reflected in a single mind) Like cast off clothes was left behind In ashes, yet with hopes that she, Re-born from holy poverty, In lenten lands, hereafter may Resume them on her Easter Day." (Epitaph for Joy Gresham)
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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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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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It's like the sound of a chuckle in the darkness. The sense that some shattering and disarming simplicity is the real answer.
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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.