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Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ʿreligionʾ mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better.
C. S. Lewis
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Good and evil increase at compound interest. That's why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance.
C. S. Lewis
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When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
C. S. Lewis
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Good beats upon the damned incessantly as sound waves beat on the ears of the deaf, but they cannot receive it. Their fists are clenched, their teeth are clenched, their eyes fast shut. First they will not, in the end they cannot, open their hands for gifts, or their mouth for food, or their eyes to see.
C. S. Lewis
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She did not shut it properly because she knew that it is very silly to shut oneself into a wardrobe, even if it is not a magic one.
C. S. Lewis
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Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more that all the land.
C. S. Lewis
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Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Each time you fall He'll pick you up. He knows your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection
C. S. Lewis
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It was when I was happiest that I longed most...The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing...to find the place where all the beauty came from.
C. S. Lewis
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There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.'
C. S. Lewis
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Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly - are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
C. S. Lewis
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For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
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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Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.
C. S. Lewis
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This was the very reason why you were brought to Narnia, that by knowing me here for a little, you may know me better there.
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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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.
C. S. Lewis
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If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.
C. S. Lewis
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Did I hate him, then? Indeed, I believe so. A love like that can grow to be nine-tenths hatred and still call itself love.
C. S. Lewis
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The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.
C. S. Lewis
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Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.
C. S. Lewis
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You have a traitor there, Aslan," said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he'd been through and after the talk he'd had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn't seem to matter what the Witch said.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
