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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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It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.
C. S. Lewis
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Whenever a person dwells chiefly, or even frequently, on the faults of other people's religions, he is in a bad condition.
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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Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.
C. S. Lewis
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One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.
C. S. Lewis
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Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.
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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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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''Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?''
C. S. Lewis
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I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
C. S. Lewis
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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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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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You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
C. S. Lewis
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Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
C. S. Lewis
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Lucy went first, biting her lip and trying not to say all the things she thought of saying to Susan. But she forgot them when she fixed her eyes on Aslan.
C. S. Lewis
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In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.
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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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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We do not enjoy a story fully at the first reading. Not till the curiosity, the sheer narrative lust, has been given its sop and laid asleep, are we at leisure to savour the real beauties.
C. S. Lewis
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Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.
C. S. Lewis
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But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees
C. S. Lewis
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You're a mere chick. I remember you when you were a egg. Don't come trying to teach me, sir. Crabs and crumpets!
C. S. Lewis
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The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
C. S. Lewis
