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It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
C. S. Lewis
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Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.
C. S. Lewis
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A particular ikon an aid to devotion may be itself a word of art, but that is logically accidental; its artistic merits will not make it a better ... ikon. They may make it a worse one.
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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Our struggle is--isn't it?--to achieve and retain faith on a lower level. To believe that there is a Listener at all. For as the situation grows more and more desperate, the grisly fears intrude. Are we only talking to ourselves in an empty universe? The silence is often so emphatic. And we have prayed so much already
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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Every Christian would agree that a man's spiritual health is exactly proportional to his love for God.
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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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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In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.
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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Because we love something else more than this world, we love even this world more than those who know no other.
C. S. Lewis
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If naturalism were true then all thoughts whatever would be wholly the result of irrational causes. It cuts its own throat.
C. S. Lewis
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God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.
C. S. Lewis
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Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.
C. S. Lewis
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There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?
C. S. Lewis
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Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
C. S. Lewis
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Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.
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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All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your earthly world; but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real World.
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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And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.
C. S. Lewis
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It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.
C. S. Lewis
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If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
C. S. Lewis
