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The real Oxford is a close corporation of jolly, untidy, lazy, good-for-nothing humorous old men, who have been electing their own successors ever since the world began and who intend to go on with it. They'll squeeze under the Revolution or leap over it when the time comes, don't you worry.
C. S. Lewis
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Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.'
C. S. Lewis
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I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.
C. S. Lewis
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Man, even now, can do wonders to animals: my cat and dog live together in my house and seem to like it. It may have been one of man's functions to restore peace to the animal world, and if he had not joined the enemy he might have succeeded in doing so to an extent now hardly imaginable.
C. S. Lewis
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Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
C. S. Lewis
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I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now... Come further up, come further in!
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Bad art is never really enjoyed in the same sense in which good art is enjoyed. It is only "liked": it never startles, prostrates, and takes captive.
C. S. Lewis
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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
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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It is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.
C. S. Lewis
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Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority... Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada.
C. S. Lewis
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We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all."
C. S. Lewis
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Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.
C. S. Lewis
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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
C. S. Lewis
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It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.
C. S. Lewis
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Remember He is the artist and you are the picture. You can’t see it, you can't see your true self. So quietly submit to be painted.
C. S. Lewis
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I'd sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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If we ignore it the truth that God is love may slyly come to mean for us the converse, that love is God.
C. S. Lewis
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Be confident small immortals. You are not the only voice that all things utter, nor is there eternal silence in the places where you cannot come.
C. S. Lewis
