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Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal.
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A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmán, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing.
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A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.
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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.
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A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said wouldn't be a great moral teacher. He'd be either a lunatic on a level with a man who says he's a poached egg or else he'd be the devil of hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse.
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It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.
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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.
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The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
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Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that 'this present' might be 'the world's last night'; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.
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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).
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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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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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If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
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There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
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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.
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God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
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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.
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Not my idea of God, but God.
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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.
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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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The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
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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.
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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.
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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.