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As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.
C. S. Lewis
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In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.
C. S. Lewis
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Don't you mind," said Puddleglum. "There are no accidents. Our guide is Aslan; and he was there when the giant king caused the letters to be cut, and he knew already all things that would come of them; including this.
C. S. Lewis
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Well, you know how it feels if you begin hoping for something that you want desperately badly; you almost fight against the hope because it is too good to be true; you've been disappointed so often before.
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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Isn't it funny the way some combinations of words can give you--almost apart from their meaning--a thrill like music?
C. S. Lewis
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Could one start a Stagnation Party-which at General Elections would boast that during its term of office no event of the least importance had taken place?
C. S. Lewis
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We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.
C. S. Lewis
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If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we may take it it is worth paying.
C. S. Lewis
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What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'
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 need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
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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Devils are depicted with bats' wings and good angels with birds' wings, not because anyone holds that moral deterioration would be likely to turn feathers into membrane, but because most men like birds better than bats.
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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All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only beloved who will never pass away.
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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If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal; but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.
C. S. Lewis
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A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.
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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The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...
C. S. Lewis
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Everyone says that forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive yet tasted one of the most sublime enjoyments of life.
C. S. Lewis
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When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.
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
