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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
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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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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War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice.
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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I'm hunger. I'm thirst. Where I bite, I hold till I die, and even after death they must cut out my mouthful from my enemy's body and bury it with me. I can fast a hundred years and not die. I can lie a hundred nights on the ice and not freeze. I can drink a river of blood and not burst. Show me your enemies.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
C. S. Lewis
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Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.
C. S. Lewis
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If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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The Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they, nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world.
C. S. Lewis
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...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory
C. S. Lewis
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I hope, said the third, that your wanderings in lonely places do not mean that you have any of the romantic virus still in your blood. His name was Mr. Humanist.
C. S. Lewis
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That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God.
C. S. Lewis
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Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature...
C. S. Lewis
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Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
C. S. Lewis
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Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
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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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.
C. S. Lewis
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The process of being brought up, however well it is done, cannot fail to offend.
C. S. Lewis
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One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
C. S. Lewis
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It will not bother me in the hour of death to reflect that I have been "had for a sucker" by any number of imposters but it would be a torment to know that one had refused even one person in need.
C. S. Lewis
