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"Don't bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior
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No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
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We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
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Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
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And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
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Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.
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[Repentance] means unlearning all the self-conceit and self -will that we have been training ourselves into... It means killing part of yourself, under-going a kind of death.
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The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.
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You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
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Here. All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.
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I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
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If the parents in each generation always or often knew what really goes on at their sons' schools, the history of education would be very different.
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The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.
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If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.
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The perfect church service would be the one we were almost unaware of; our attention would have been on God. But every novelty prevents this. It fixes our attention on the service itself; and thinking about worship is a different thing than worshipping ... 'Tis mad idolatry that makes the service greater than the god.
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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.'
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Man's conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature's conquest of Man.
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You will not find the warrior, the poet, the philosopher or the Christian by staring into his eyes as if he were your mistress: better fight beside him, read with him, argue with him, pray with him.
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Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
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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.
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If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
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If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic - to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.
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The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.