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The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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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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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Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid, even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up, they were so used to quarrelling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.
C. S. Lewis
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Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.
C. S. Lewis
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No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good...Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
C. S. Lewis
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There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbor he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ verse latitat - the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.
C. S. Lewis
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Yes, I know,' interrupted Puddleglum. 'And few return to the sunlit lands. You needn't say it again. You are a chap of one idea, aren't you?
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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'Ah, Psyche,' I said, 'have I made you so little happy as that?'
C. S. Lewis
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The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?
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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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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The more imagination the reader has ... the more he will do for himself. He will, at a mere hint from the author, flood wretched material with suggestion and never guess that he is himself chiefly making what he enjoys.
C. S. Lewis
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In order that we finite beings may apprehend the Emporer He translates His glory into multiple forms - into stars, woods, waters, beasts, and the bodies of men.
C. S. Lewis
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Falling in love is something that happens to us, being is love is something we do. No passion is self preservatory.
C. S. Lewis
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To admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] is to give one's vote not only for a world of misery, but also for a world of lies and propaganda, of wishful thinking, of incessant autobiography.
C. S. Lewis
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There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.
C. S. Lewis
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I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.
C. S. Lewis
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We may note in passing that He (Jesus) was never regarded as a mere moral teacher. He did not produce that effect on any of the people who actually met Him. He produced mainly three effects - Hatred - Terror - Adoration. There was no trace of people expressing mild admiration.
C. S. Lewis
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The most precious gift that marriage gave me was the constant impact of something very close and intimate, yet all the time unmistakably other, resistant - in a word, real.
C. S. Lewis
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The people who keep asking if they can't lead a decent life without Christ, don't know what life is about; if they did they would know that 'a decent life' is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.
C. S. Lewis
