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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world
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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.
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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.
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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. 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.
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If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
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The true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ.'... He will never commit the error of trying to munch whipped cream as if it were venison.
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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.
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Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
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Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.
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This is where dreams-dreams, do you understand-come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.
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At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
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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.
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The victory of vivisection marks a great advance in the triumph of ruthless, non-moral utilitarianism over the old world of ethical law; a triumph in which we, as well as animals, are already the victims, and of which Dachau and Hiroshima mark the more recent achievements.
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As for wrinkles--Pshaw! Why shouldn't we have wrinkles? Honorable insignia of long service in this warfare.
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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.
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Their own strength has betrayed them. They have...pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.
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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.
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My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.
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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.