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I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.
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All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only beloved who will never pass away.
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He (the devil) always sends errors into the world in pairs--pairs of opposites...He relies on your extra dislike of one to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.
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I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
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Language exists to communicate whatever it can communicate. Some things it communicates so badly that we never attempt to communicate them by words if any other medium is available.
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The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.
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I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
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I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness; you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents; only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God. (pg 40)
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Evil can be undone, but it cannot 'develop' into good. Time does not heal it. The spell must be unwound, bit by bit, 'with backward mutters of dissevering power' - or else not.
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The Old Testament contains fabulous elements. The New Testament consists mostly of teaching, not of narrative at all: but where it is narrative, it is, in my opinion, historical. As to the fabulous element in the Old Testament, I very much doubt if you would be wise to chuck it out.
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
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When golden moments come, when God enables one really to pray without words, who but a fool would reject the gift?
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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'.
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God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.
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There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
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Everything except God has some natural superior; everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
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But now I discovered the wonderful power of wine. I understood why men become drunkards. For the way it worked on me was not at all that it blotted out these sorrows, but that it made them seem glorious and noble, like sad music, and I somehow great and revered for feeling them.
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If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.
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Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?
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Child, that is why all the rest are now a horror to her. That is what happens to those who pluck and eat fruits at the wrong time and in the wrong way. Oh, the fruit is good, but they loath it ever after.
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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.
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As long as he doesn't convert it into action, it does not matter how much a man thinks about his repentance.
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Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
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All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.