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Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices.
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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Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
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 Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity.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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A man, an adult, is precisely what Aeneas is: Achilles had been little more than a passionate boy.
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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The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to how it did this are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to how it works; what all Christians are agreed on is that it does work.
C. S. Lewis
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The prayer preceding all prayers is 'May it be the real I who speaks. May it be the real Thou that I speak to.'
C. S. Lewis
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100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
C. S. Lewis
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If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
C. S. Lewis
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The story itself should force its moral upon you. You find out what the moral is by writing the story.
C. S. Lewis
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We poison the wine as He decants it into us; murder a melody He would play with us as the instrument...Hence all sin, whatever else it is, is sacrilege.
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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Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue – I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.
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
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.
C. S. Lewis
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The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
C. S. Lewis
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The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
C. S. Lewis
