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It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.
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Human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself. If men had postponed the search for knowledge and beauty until they were secure, the search would never have begun.
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I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time...The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give up.
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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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Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.
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We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.
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But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.
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Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.
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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.
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A universe whose only claim to be believed in rests on the validity of inference must not start telling us the inference is invalid.
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We have lost the invaluable faculty of being shocked a faculty which has hitherto almost distinguished the Man or Woman from the beast or child.
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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.
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I have discovered that the people who believe most strongly in the next life do the most good in the present one.
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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.
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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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An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy. If a man's mind is open on these things, let his mouth at least be shut. He can say nothing to the purpose. Outside the Tao there is no ground for criticizing either the Tao or anything else.
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Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
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Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.
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We have not, in fact, proved that science excludes miracles: we have only proved that the question of miracles, like innumerable other questions, excludes laboratory treatment.
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To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.
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Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
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What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'
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Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
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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.