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Five senses; an incurably abstract intellect; a haphazardly selective memory; a set of preconceptions and assumptions so numerous that I can never examine more than a minority of them - never become even conscious of them all.
C. S. Lewis
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Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.
C. S. Lewis
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All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
C. S. Lewis
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It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost Him crucifixion.
C. S. Lewis
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I would prefer to battle the 'I'm special' feeling not by the thought, 'I'm no more special than anyone else,' by by the feeling, 'Everyone is as special as me.'
C. S. Lewis
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I#pray because the need flows out of me all the time-walking and sleeping. It does not change # God - it changes me.
C. S. Lewis
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It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
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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There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
C. S. Lewis
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If human life is in fact ordered by a beneficent being whose knowledge of our real needs and of the way in which they can be satisfied infinitely exceeds our own, we must expect a priori that his operations will often appear to us far from beneficent and far from wise, and that it will be our highest prudence to give him our confidence in spite of this.
C. S. Lewis
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If and when a horror turns up you will then be given Grace to help you. I don't think one is usually given it in advance. "Give us our daily bread" (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too; the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day and hour by hour.
C. S. Lewis
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When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
C. S. Lewis
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A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
C. S. Lewis
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You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
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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Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.
C. S. Lewis
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In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble--because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out." - Mere Christianity
C. S. Lewis
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If God were a Kantian, who would not have us till we came to Him from the purest and best motives, who could be saved?
C. S. Lewis
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Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
C. S. Lewis
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We are forbidden to neglect the assembling of ourselves together. Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents. The Church is the Bride of Christ. We are members of one another.
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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We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.
C. S. Lewis
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When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
C. S. Lewis
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He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
C. S. Lewis
