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Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it. The hypothesis has certain facts to support it. As far as peace (which is one ingredient in our idea of civilization)is concerned, I think many would now agree that a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war.
C. S. Lewis
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The idea which...shuts out the Second Coming from our minds, the idea of the world slowly ripening to perfection, is a myth, not a generalization from experience.
C. S. Lewis
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Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure.
C. S. Lewis
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Death opens a door out of a little, dark room (that's all the life we have known before it) into a great, real place where the true sun shines and we shall meet.
C. S. Lewis
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Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.
C. S. Lewis
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The human heart is not unchanging (nay, changes almost out of recognition in the twinkling of an eye).
C. S. Lewis
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There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.
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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Other than heaven, the only place where one's heart is completely safe from the dangers of love is hell.
C. S. Lewis
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For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
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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I am a product [...of] endless books. My father bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.... I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.
C. S. Lewis
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Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
C. S. Lewis
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Scripture itself is not systematic; the New Testament shows the greatest variety. God has shown us that he can use any instrument. Balaam's ass, you remember, preached a very effective sermon in the midst of his 'hee-haws.'
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though the world might last a hundred years.
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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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
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Christ says, 'Give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.'
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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It takes all sorts to make a world; or a church. This may be even truer of a church. If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell.
C. S. Lewis
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The birth of Christ is the central event in the history of the earth-- the very thing the whole story has been about.
C. S. Lewis
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When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.
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
