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But why,... if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own? Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality.
C. S. Lewis
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A creature revolting against a creator is revolting against the source of his own powers-including even his power to revolt...It is like the scent of a flower trying to destroy the flower.
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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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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Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.
C. S. Lewis
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She remembered, as every sensible person does, that you should never never shut yourself up in a wardrobe.
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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Those who tread 'adult' as a term of approval cannot hope to be considered adult themselves. When I became a man I put away childish things, along with the desire to be very grown up.
C. S. Lewis
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The Christians say that God has done miracles. The modern world, even when it believes in God, and even when it has see the defenselessness of nature, does not. It thinks God would not do that sort of thing.
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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It is by human avarice or human stupidity, not by the churlishness of nature, that we have poverty and overwork.
C. S. Lewis
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Those of us who are blamed when old for reading childish books were blamed when children for reading books too old for us.
C. S. Lewis
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Scripture itself is not systematic; the New Testament shows the greatest variety. God has shown us that he can use any instrument. Balaam's ass, you remember, preached a very effective sermon in the midst of his 'hee-haws.'
C. S. Lewis
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But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, "Courage, dear heart," and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan's, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face.
C. S. Lewis
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I wish they would remember that the charge to Peter was "Feed my sheep", not "Try experiments on my rats", or even "Teach my performing dogs new tricks".
C. S. Lewis
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If religion does not make us better people, it will make us very much worse. And of all the bad men who have lived, the religious "bad man" is the worst of all.
C. S. Lewis
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When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
C. S. Lewis
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The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
C. S. Lewis
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We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
C. S. Lewis
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There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.
C. S. Lewis
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It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.
C. S. Lewis
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He told people that their sins were forgiven, and never waited to consult all the other people whom their sins had undoubtedly injured. He unhesitatingly behaved as if He was the party chiefly concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offenses. This makes sense only if He really was God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
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
