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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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God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
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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Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
C. S. Lewis
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We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.
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
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But do you really mean, Sir," said Peter, "that there could be other worlds-all over the place, just round the corner-like that?" "Nothing is more probable," said the Profesor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, "I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.
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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I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.
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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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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To make Christianity a private affair while banishing all privacy is to relegate it to the rainbow's end or the Greek Calends.
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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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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If we are any good we must always be working towards the moment at which our Pupils are fit to become our Critics & Rivals
C. S. Lewis
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If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?
C. S. Lewis
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If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.
C. S. Lewis
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Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
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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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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Holy places are dark places. It is life and strength, not knowledge and words, that we get in them. Holy wisdom is not clear and thin like water, but thick and dark like blood.
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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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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We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good; if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
C. S. Lewis
