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The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination
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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.
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The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ.
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They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.
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We are finite and God will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.
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Everywhere, except in theology, there has been a vigorous growth of skepticism about skepticism itself.
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Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
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and a charge of lying against someone whom you have always found truthful is a very serious thing; a very serious thing indeed.
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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.
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Anyone who endeavors to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. You are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
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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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I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.
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Free will, though it makes evil possible, also makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
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Many a man, brought up in the glib profession of some shallow form of Christianity, who comes through reading Astronomy to realize for the first time how majestically indifferent most reality is to man, and who perhaps abandons his religion on that account, may at that moment be having his first genuinely religious experience.
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Prosperity knits a man to the world. He feels that he is finding his place in it, while really it is finding its place in him.
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Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
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We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.
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All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.
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Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
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We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.
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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.
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There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion ('man's search for God'!) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?
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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.
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If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.