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Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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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If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which 'took these things into account' was not faith but imagination.
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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One flesh. Or if you prefer, one ship. The starboard engine has gone. I, the port engine, must chug along somehow till we make harbour. Or rather, till the journey ends.
C. S. Lewis
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It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
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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But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.
C. S. Lewis
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The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.
C. S. Lewis
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I think it very wrong to pray for people while they are in distress and then not to continue praying, now with thanksgiving, when they are relieved.
C. S. Lewis
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God has landed on this enemy-occupied world in human form...The perfect surrender and humiliation was undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was man.
C. S. Lewis
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We long for more and God's promise is that there is more awaiting us. More to delight us than we will ever exhaust.
C. S. Lewis
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If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing-rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.
C. S. Lewis
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Many thousands of people have had the experience of finding the first friend, and it is none the less a wonder; as great a wonder (pace the novelists) as first love, or even greater.
C. S. Lewis
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I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.
C. S. Lewis
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And in truth (as I now see) I had the wish to put off my journey as long as I could. Not for any peril or labour it might cost; but because I could see nothing in the whole world for me to do once it was accomplished. AS long as this act lay before me, there was, as it were, some barrier between me and the dead desert which the rest of my life must be.
C. S. Lewis
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We do not come to God as bad people trying to become good people; we come as rebels to lay down our arms.
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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I think He made one law of that kind in order that there might be obedience. In all these other matters what you call obeying Him is but doing what seems good in your own eyes also. Is love content with that?
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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The Psalmists in telling everyone to praise God are doing what all men do when they speak of what they care about.
C. S. Lewis
