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Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
C. S. Lewis
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We need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
C. S. Lewis
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Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
C. S. Lewis
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We do not want to merely “see” beauty. We want to be united with it, to receive it into ourselves, to become part of it.
C. S. Lewis
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Here, I think, lies our real dilemma. Probably we cannot, certainly we shall not, retrace our steps. We are tamed animals (some with kind, some with cruel, masters) and should probably starve if we got out of our cage. That is one horn of the dilemma. But in an increasingly planned society, how much of what I value can survive? That is the other horn.
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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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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The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become - because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be. . .It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.
C. S. Lewis
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Daughter, I have now lived a hundred and nine winters in this world and have never yet met any such thing as Luck. There is something about all this that I do not understand: but if ever we need to know it, you may be sure that we shall.
C. S. Lewis
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What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses. Even in this life, matter would be nothing to us if it were not the source of sensations.
C. S. Lewis
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Her face was working and twitching with passion, but his looked up at the sky, still quiet, neither angry nor afraid, but a little sad.
C. S. Lewis
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You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
C. S. Lewis
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we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours.
C. S. Lewis
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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
C. S. Lewis
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No mind is so good that it does not need another mind to counter and equal it, and to save it from conceit and bigotry and folly
C. S. Lewis
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I believe that there are too many accommodating preachers... Jesus Christ did not say "Go into the world and tell the world that it is quite right." The Gospel is something completely different. In fact, it is directly opposed to the world.
C. S. Lewis
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Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.
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. 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.
C. S. Lewis
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Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
C. S. Lewis
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The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
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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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.
C. S. Lewis
