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Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours if it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static pain often is... is it not yet enough?
C. S. Lewis
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Though we cannot experience our life as an endless present, we are eternal in God's eyes; that is, in our deepest reality.
C. S. Lewis
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Though it was bright sunshine everyone felt suddenly cold. The only two people present who seemed to be quite at their ease were Aslan and the Witch herself. It was the oddest thing to see those two faces - the golden face and the dead-white face so close together. Not that the Witch looked Aslan exactly in his eyes; Mrs Beaver particularly noticed this.
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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Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. ... We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means—the only complete realist.
C. S. Lewis
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Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they 'own' their bodies - those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
C. S. Lewis
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A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
C. S. Lewis
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When humans should have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
C. S. Lewis
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Unless Christianity is wholly false, the perception of ourselves which we have in moments of shame must be the only true one.
C. S. Lewis
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Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.
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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The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'
C. S. Lewis
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Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says; we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.
C. S. Lewis
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Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?
C. S. Lewis
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It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
C. S. Lewis
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We seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves . . . We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own . . . We demand windows.
C. S. Lewis
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We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.
C. S. Lewis
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There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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You and I who still enjoy fairy tales have less reason to wish actual childhood back. We have kept its pleasures and added some grown-up ones as well.
C. S. Lewis
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Child,' said the Lion, 'I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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
