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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.
C. S. Lewis
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The theory that thought is merely a movement in the brain is, in my opinion, nonsense; for if so, that theory itself would be merely a movement, an event among atoms, which may have speed and direction but of which it would be meaningless to use the words 'true' or 'false'.
C. S. Lewis
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[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.
C. S. Lewis
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War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
C. S. Lewis
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Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
C. S. Lewis
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The command "Be ye prfect" is not idealistic gas. Nor is it a command to do the impossible. He said (in the Bible) that we were "gods" and he is going to make good his words. He will make us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature...a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly.
C. S. Lewis
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It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been "had for a sucker" by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.
C. S. Lewis
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I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.
C. S. Lewis
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Children are not deceived by fairy-tales; they are often and gravely deceived by school-stories. Adults are not deceived by science-fiction ; they can be deceived by the stories in the women's magazines.
C. S. Lewis
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I have been suspected of being what is called a Fundamentalist. That is because I never regard any narrative as unhistorical simply on the ground that it includes the miraculous.
C. S. Lewis
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Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue – I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.
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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The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?
C. S. Lewis
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If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must think of God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
C. S. Lewis
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If the Church is not Making Disciples, then all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible, are a waste of time.
C. S. Lewis
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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.'
C. S. Lewis
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Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.
C. S. Lewis
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Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
C. S. Lewis
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We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
C. S. Lewis
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Nature never taught me that there exists a God of glory and of infinite majesty. I had to learn that in other ways. But nature gave the word glory a meaning for me. I still do not know where else I could have found one.
C. S. Lewis
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But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are 'on' concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
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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You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.
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
