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Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope and probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the great battle.
C. S. Lewis
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All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.
C. S. Lewis
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The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.
C. S. Lewis
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The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
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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Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."
C. S. Lewis
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With my mother's death all settled happiness, all that was tranquil and reliable, disappeared from my life. There was to be much fun, many pleasures, many stabs of Joy; but no more of the old security. It was sea and islands now; the great continent had sunk like Atlantis.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
C. S. Lewis
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We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals...The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man.
C. S. Lewis
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Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect- perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, health, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain.
C. S. Lewis
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Prayer is either a sheer illusion or a personal contact between embryonic, incomplete persons (ourselves) and the utterly concrete Person.
C. S. Lewis
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Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority... Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada.
C. S. Lewis
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He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.
C. S. Lewis
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If you never take risks, you'll never accomplish great things. Everybody dies, but not everyone has lived.
C. S. Lewis
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When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
C. S. Lewis
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I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily
C. S. Lewis
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You don’t think – not possibly – not as a mere hundredth chance – there might be things that are real though we can’t see them? … If there are souls, could there not be soul-houses?
C. S. Lewis
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A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.
C. S. Lewis
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We 'have all we want' is a terrible saying when 'all' does not include God. We find God an interruption. As St. Augustine says somewhere, 'God wants to give us something, but cannot, because our hands are full - there's nowhere for Him to put it.'
C. S. Lewis
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We do not want merely to see beauty... we want something else which can hardly be put into words- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it. That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses, and nymphs and elves.
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
