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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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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 more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
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
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I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.
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
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Growing maturity is marked by the increasing liberties we take with our travelling... we made the discovery (some people never make it) that real books can be taken on a journey and that hours of golden reading can so be added to its other delights.
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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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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Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
C. S. Lewis
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It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
C. S. Lewis
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The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be "like real life" in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
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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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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If God thinks this state of war in the universe is a price worth paying for free will--that is, for making a live world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings--then we may take it it is worth paying.
C. S. Lewis
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And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the time, it is most important thus to cut every generation off from all others; for where learning makes a free commerce between the ages there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
C. S. Lewis
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if anyone present wishes to make me the subject of his wit, I am very much at his service--with my sword--whenever he has leisure.
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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In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms - into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men.
C. S. Lewis
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Most of all, perhaps, we need an intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has anything magical about it, but we cannot study the future.
C. S. Lewis
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A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.
C. S. Lewis
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Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
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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A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible.
C. S. Lewis
