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As a Christian I take it for granted that human history will some day end; and I am offering Omniscience no advice as to the best date for that consummation.
C. S. Lewis
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If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C. S. Lewis
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The proper good of a creature is to surrender itself to its Creator—to enact intellectually, volitionally, and emotionally, that relationship which is given in the mere fact of its being a creature. When it does so, it is good and happy.
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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To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.
C. S. Lewis
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I do not doubt that if the Paradisal man could now appear among us, we should regard him as an utter savage, a creature to be exploited or, at best, patronised. Only one or two, and those the holiest among us, would glance a second time at the naked, shaggy-bearded, slow spoken creature: but they, after a few minutes, would fall at his feet.
C. S. Lewis
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The assumption that things which have been conjured in the past will always be conjured in the guiding principle not of rational but of animal behavior.
C. S. Lewis
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
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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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest." He also said: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of 50 and beyond.
C. S. Lewis
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Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.
C. S. Lewis
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Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.
C. S. Lewis
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One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
C. S. Lewis
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The desire for bad art is the desire bred of habit: like the smoker's desire for tobacco, more marked by the extreme malaise of denial than by any very strong delight in fruition.
C. S. Lewis
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Fancy sleeping on air. I wonder if anyone's done it before. I don't suppose they have. Oh, bother—-Scrubb probably has!
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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The most intense joy, lies not in the having, but in the desire, Delight that never fades, bliss that is eternal, Is only your, when what you most desire, is just out of reach...Anthony Hopkins, from the movie Shadowlands, where he plays C.S. Lewis
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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If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.
C. S. Lewis
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Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
C. S. Lewis
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You cannot study Pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.
C. S. Lewis
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What we called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I loved you for my own sake: because I needed you...We shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.
C. S. Lewis
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The Christian life is simply a process of having your natural self changed into a Christ self, and that this process goes on very far inside. One's most private wishes, one's point of view, are the things that have to be changed.
C. S. Lewis
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Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty.
C. S. Lewis
