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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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God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
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
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Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
C. S. Lewis
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It would be nice and fairly nearly true, to say that 'from that time forth, Eustace was a different boy.' To be strictly accurate, he began to be a different boy. He had relapses. There were still many days when he could be very tiresome. But most of those I shall not notice. The cure had begun.
C. S. Lewis
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Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
C. S. Lewis
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But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that?" "Nothing is more probable," said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.
C. S. Lewis
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In a civilization like ours, I feel that everyone has to come to terms with the claims of Jesus Christ upon his life, or else be guilty of inattention or of evading the question.
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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God is basic Fact. He must not be thought of as a featureless generality. He is the most concrete thing there is.
C. S. Lewis
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If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.
C. S. Lewis
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We forgive, we mortify our resentment; a week later some chain of thought carries us back to the original offence and we discover the old resentment blazing away as if nothing had been done about it at all. We need to forgive our brother seventy times seven not only for 490 offences but for one offence.
C. S. Lewis
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Extraordinary things only happen to extraordinary people. Maybe it's a sign that you've got an extraordinary destiny--something greater than you could've imagined.
C. S. Lewis
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It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins.
C. S. Lewis
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We must beware of the Past, mustn't we? I mean that any fixing of the mind on old evils beyond what is absolutely necessary for repenting our own sins and forgiving those of others is certainly useless and usually bad for us. Notice in Dante that the lost souls are entirely concerned with their past! Not so the saved.
C. S. Lewis
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We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.
C. S. Lewis
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Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.
C. S. Lewis
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I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.
C. S. Lewis
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Nature does not teach. A true philosophy may sometimes validate an experience of nature; an experience of nature cannot validate a philosophy. Nature will not verify any theological or metaphysical proposition (or not in the manner we are now considering); she will help to show what it means.
C. S. Lewis
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It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good.
C. S. Lewis
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In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.
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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Thus we have now for many centuries triumphed over nature to the extent of making certain secondary characteristics of the male (such as the beard) disagreeable to nearly all the females—and there is more in that than you might suppose.
C. S. Lewis
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As Christians we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the faith. We give in too much. Now, I don't mean that we should run the risk of making a nuisance of ourselves by witnessing at improper times, but there comes a time when we must show that we disagree.
C. S. Lewis
