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We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.
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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How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
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
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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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You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly; while you are making them you cannot see them. Good people know about both bad and evil; bad people do not know about either.
C. S. Lewis
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Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.
C. S. Lewis
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I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness; you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents; only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God. (pg 40)
C. S. Lewis
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When there came a sound that I'd never heard the like of in all my born days. Eh, I won't forget that. The whole air was full of it, loud as thunder but far longer, cool and sweet as music over water but strong enough to shake the woods. And I said to myself, 'If that's not the Horn, call me a rabbit.
C. S. Lewis
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God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair?
C. S. Lewis
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What you want is practice, practice, practice. It doesn’t matter what we write (at least this is my view) at our age, so long as we write continually as well as we can. I feel that every time I write a page either of prose or of verse, with real effort, even if it’s thrown into the fire the next minute, I am so much further on.
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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No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
C. S. Lewis
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Man's conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. There neither is nor can be any simple increase of power on Man's side. Each new power won by man is a power over man as well.
C. S. Lewis
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I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptation. It is not serious, provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience, etc., don't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep picking ourselves up each time...The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give up.
C. S. Lewis
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Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit.
C. S. Lewis
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A man who first tried to guess 'what the public wants,' and then preached that as Christianity because the public wants it, would be a pretty mixture of fool and knave
C. S. Lewis
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[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
C. S. Lewis
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I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.
C. S. Lewis
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Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors.
C. S. Lewis
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'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
C. S. Lewis
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The only thing one can usually change in one's situation is oneself. And yet one can't change that either-only ask Our Lord to do so.
C. S. Lewis
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It certainly is my opinion that a book worth reading only in childhood is not worth reading even then.
C. S. Lewis
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Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.
C. S. Lewis
