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We must stop regarding unpleasant or unexpected things as interruptions of real life. The truth is that interruptions are real life.
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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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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The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
C. S. Lewis
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Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.
C. S. Lewis
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It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
C. S. Lewis
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There are no variations except for those who know a norm, and no subtleties for those who have not grasped the obvious.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
C. S. Lewis
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The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.
C. S. Lewis
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The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.
C. S. Lewis
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Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else. (Notice this means that if you are interested only in writing you will never be a writer, because you will have nothing to write about...)
C. S. Lewis
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Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play - 'Halt!'
C. S. Lewis
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I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.
C. S. Lewis
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It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
C. S. Lewis
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We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.
C. S. Lewis
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And how could we endure to live and let time pass if we were always crying for one day or one year to come back--if we did not know that every day in a life fills the whole life with expectation and memory and that these are that day?
C. S. Lewis
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Sometimes it is hard not to say, 'God forgive God.' Sometimes it is hard to say so much. But if our faith is true, He didn't. He crucified Him.
C. S. Lewis
