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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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He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.
C. S. Lewis
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I could well believe that it is God's intention, since we have refused milder remedies, to compel [Christians] into unity, by persecution even. Satan is without doubt nothing else than a hammer in the hand of a benevolent and severe God.
C. S. Lewis
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How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been: how gloriously different are the saints.
C. S. Lewis
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And for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream. But things that many see may have no taste or moment in them at all, and things that are shown only to one may be spears and water-spouts of truth from the very depth of truth.
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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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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The return from the walk, and the arrival of tea, should be exactly coincident, and not later than a quarter past four.
C. S. Lewis
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No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.
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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The gap between those who worship different gods is not so wide as the gap between those who worship and those who don't.
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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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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Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.
C. S. Lewis
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We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.
C. S. Lewis
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Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun.
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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The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
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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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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The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions: no one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise to never have a headache or always to feel hungry.
C. S. Lewis
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The mark of Friendship is not that help will be given when the pinch comes (of course it will) but that, having been given, it makes no difference at all.
C. S. Lewis
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When we force a boy to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy his standards, perhaps for life.
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
