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You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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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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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Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
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. 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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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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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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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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Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Friendship, I have said, 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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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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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 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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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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Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion"..."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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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
