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The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
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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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 need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
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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I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me.
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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What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.
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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I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
C. S. Lewis
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If anyone would like to acquire humility, the first step is to realize one is proud. Nothing can be done before it.
C. S. Lewis
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I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.
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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Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.
C. S. Lewis
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After an error you need not only to remove the causes but also to correct the error itself: after a sin you must not only, if possible, remove the temptation, you must also go back and repent the sin itself. In each case an 'undoing' is required.
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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I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say 'at last', I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do - so much have I enjoyed it.
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 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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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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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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It is quite useless knocking at the door of heaven for earthly comfort. It's not the sort of comfort they supply there.
C. S. Lewis
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There is no neutral ground in the universe. Every square inch, every split second is claimed by God, and counterclaimed by Satan.
C. S. Lewis
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I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.
C. S. Lewis
