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Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
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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There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.
C. S. Lewis
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The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
C. S. Lewis
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God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.
C. S. Lewis
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The difference [God's] timelessness makes is that this now (which slips away from you even as you say the word now) is for Him infinite.
C. S. Lewis
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In my experience, it is Affection that creates this taste, teaching us first to notice, then to endure, then to smile at, then to enjoy, and finally to appreciate the people who 'happen to be there.' Made for us? Thank God, no. They are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed.
C. S. Lewis
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[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
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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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.
C. S. Lewis
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It is a dreadful truth that the state of having to depend solely on God is what we all dread most.... It is good of Him to force us; but dear me, how hard to feel that it is good at the time.
C. S. Lewis
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Before we can be cured we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it; but for many modern people even the wish is difficult.
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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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.
C. S. Lewis
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When the opposite of your prayer occurs, your prayer hasn't been ignored; it's been considered & refused for your ultimate good.
C. S. Lewis
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A blessed spirit is a mould ever more and more patient of the bright metal poured into it, a body ever more completely uncovered to the meridian blaze of the spiritual sun.
C. S. Lewis
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But I remember more dearly autumn afternoons in bottoms that lay intensely silent under old great trees
C. S. Lewis
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Since it is so likely that (children) will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker.
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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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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Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could.
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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While friendship has been by far the chief source of my happiness, acquaintance or general society has always meant little to me, and I cannot quite understand why a man should wish to know more people than he can make real friends of.
C. S. Lewis
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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
