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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.
C. S. Lewis
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To the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves... The modern world in comparison, ignores it.
C. S. Lewis
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As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
C. S. Lewis
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God, who foresaw your tribulation, has specially armed you to go through it, not without pain but without stain.
C. S. Lewis
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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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Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only 'mouth honour' and that decreasingly.
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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If these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm. Hence both the necessity, and the perennial danger, of 'religion.'
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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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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The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.
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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The Christian and the Materialist hold different beliefs about the universe. They can't both be right. The one who is wrong will act in a way which simply doesn't fit the real universe. Consequently, with the best will in the world, he will be helping his fellow creatures to their destruction.
C. S. Lewis
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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?
C. S. Lewis
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A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black in the fact, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God.
C. S. Lewis
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When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!
C. S. Lewis
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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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If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it that you don't feel at home there?
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Death and resurrection are what the story is about and had we but eyes to see it, this has been hinted on every page, met us, in some disguise, at every turn, and even been muttered in conversations between such minor characters (if they are minor characters) as the vegetables.
C. S. Lewis
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The most valuable thing the Psalms do for me is to express the same delight in God which made David dance.
C. S. Lewis
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The way for a person to develop a style is (a) to know exactly what he wants to say, and (b) to be sure he is saying exactly that.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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
