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Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase.
C. S. Lewis -
You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
C. S. Lewis
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I am struck here by the curious mixture of justice and injustice in our lives. We are blamed for our real faults but usually not on the right occasions.
C. S. Lewis -
The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other...
C. S. Lewis -
We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century [...] lies where we have never suspected it [...] The only palliative is [...] by reading old books. [...] the books of the future would be just as good [...], but unfortunately we cannot get at them.
C. S. Lewis -
No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
C. S. Lewis
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There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a human's mind against the Enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do; our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
C. S. Lewis -
Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it.
C. S. Lewis -
One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
C. S. Lewis -
Sleeping on a dragon's hoard with greedy, dragonish thoughts in his heart, he had become a dragon himself.
C. S. Lewis -
Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
C. S. Lewis -
If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.
C. S. Lewis
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Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.
C. S. Lewis -
The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.
C. S. Lewis -
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
C. S. Lewis -
Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
It is after you have realized that there is a real Moral Law, and a Power behind the law, and that you have broken that law and put yourself wrong with that Power -- it is after all this, and not a moment sooner, that Christianity begins to talk.
C. S. Lewis
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If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying.
C. S. Lewis -
Would it not be better to be dead than to have this horrible fear that Aslan has come and is not like the Aslan we have believed in and longed for? It is as if the sun rose one day and were a black sun.
C. S. Lewis -
Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
C. S. Lewis -
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