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We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.
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If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.
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If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
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The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
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Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.
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Though it was bright sunshine everyone felt suddenly cold. The only two people present who seemed to be quite at their ease were Aslan and the Witch herself. It was the oddest thing to see those two faces - the golden face and the dead-white face so close together. Not that the Witch looked Aslan exactly in his eyes; Mrs Beaver particularly noticed this.
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Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.
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You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
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'And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.'
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But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
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When the whole world is running towards a cliff, he who is running in the opposite direction appears to have lost his mind.
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God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
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He that but looketh on a plate of ham and eggs to lust after it hath already committed breakfast with it in his heart
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Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
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The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most temporal part of time--for the Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays.
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Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistake of our own period. And that means the old books.
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My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.
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We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.
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We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.
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There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
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In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.
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Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and agreeable work build up in him a sense of being really at home on earth which is just what we want.
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I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.
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It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible Gods and Goddesses. To remember that the dullest, and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship.