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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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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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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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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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The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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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I daren't come and drink," said Jill. Then you will die of thirst," said the Lion. Oh dear!" said Jill, coming another step nearer."I suppose I must go and look for another stream then." There is no other stream," said the Lion.
C. S. Lewis
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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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Jesus produced mainly three effects: hatred, terror, adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild approval.
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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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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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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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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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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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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Am I to understand,' said Reepicheep to Lucy after a long stare at Eustace, 'That this singularly discourteous person is under your Majesty's protection? Because, if not--
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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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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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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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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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.
C. S. Lewis
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When we see the face of God we shall know that we have always known it. He has been a party to, has made, sustained and moved moment by moment within, all our earthly experiences of innocent love.
C. S. Lewis
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For the church is not a human society of people united by their natural affinities but the Body of Christ, in which all members, however different, (and He rejoices in their differences and by no means wishes to iron them out) must share the common life, complementing and helping one another precisely by their differences.
C. S. Lewis
