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Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C. S. Lewis
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I wish we didn't live in a world where buying and selling things seems to have become almost more important than either producing or using them.
C. S. Lewis
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If you don't listen to theology, that won't mean you have no ideas about God, it will mean you have a lot of wrong ones.
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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If all experienced God in the same way and returned Him an identical worship, the song of the Church triumphant would have no symphony, it would be played like an orchestra in which all instruments played the same note.
C. S. Lewis
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The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye).
C. S. Lewis
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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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Disobedience to conscience is voluntary; bad poetry, on the other hand, is usually not made on purpose.
C. S. Lewis
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This is my password," said the King as he drew his sword. "The light is dawning, the lie broken. Now guard thee, miscreant, for I am Tirian of Narnia.
C. S. Lewis
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Oh, Lor!' said the boy, sitting down on the grassy bank at the edge of the shrubbery and very quickly getting up again because the grass was soaking wet. His name was unfortunately Eustace Scrubb but he wasn't a bad sort.
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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Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
C. S. Lewis
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If I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?
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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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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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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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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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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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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Who can endure a doctrine which would allow only dentists to say whether our teeth were aching, only cobblers to say whether our shoes hurt us, and only governments to tell us whether we were being well governed?
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 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.
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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If we did not bring to the examinations of our instincts a knowledge of their comparative dignity we could never learn it from them.
C. S. Lewis
