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What do people mean when they say, 'I am not afraid of God because I know He is good'? Have they never even been to a dentist?
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You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.
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Those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
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The process of living seems to consist in coming to realize truths so ancient and simple that, if stated, they sound like barren platitudes.
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If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?
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Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.
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But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that it also is dreadful? How if food itself turns out to be the very thing you can't eat, and home the very place you can't live, and your very comforter the person who makes you uncomfortable? Then, indeed, there is no rescue possible: the last card has been played.
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The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.
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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.
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If anyone would like to acquire humility, the first step is to realize one is proud. Nothing can be done before it.
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And all the time - such is the tragic comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
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The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred
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God, in the end, gives people what they most want, including freedom from himself. What could be more fair?
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A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed.
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[God] will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist's shop.
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Every object you see before you at this moment -the walls, ceiling, and furniture, the book, your own washed hands and cut fingernails, bears witness to the colonization of Nature of Reason.
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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.
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We must perpetually try to distinguish, however closely they get entwined by the subtle nature of the facts and by the secret importunity of our passions, those attitudes in a writer which we can honestly and confidently condemn as real evils, and those qualities in his writing which simply annoy and offend us as men of taste.
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I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.
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No, I don’t wish I knew Heaven was like the picture in my Great Divorce, because, if we knew that, we should know it was no better. The good things even of this world are far too good ever to be reached by imagination. Even the common orange, you know: no one could have imagined it before he tasted it. How much less Heaven.
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The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.
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You ask ‘for what’ God wants you. Isn’t the primary answer that He wants you. We’re not told that the lost sheep was sought out for anything except itself [Matthew 18:12-14; Luke 15:3-7]. Of course, He may have a special job for you: and the certain job is that of becoming more and more His.
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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.
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When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy.