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Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others; but then we think you will get help towards obeying them which you will not get towards obeying the others.
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
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Inner silence is for our race a difficult achievement. There is a chattering part of the mind which continues, until it is corrected, to chatter on even in the holiest places.
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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A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.
C. S. Lewis
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The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.
C. S. Lewis
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Christ, who said to the disciples, 'You have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,' can truly say to every group of Christian friends, 'You have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.'
C. S. Lewis
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You'll never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking what sort of impression you make.
C. S. Lewis
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Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.
C. S. Lewis
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Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.
C. S. Lewis
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A great deal of what is being published by writers in the religious tradition is a scandal and is actually turning people away from the church. The liberal writers who are continually accommodating and whittling down the truth of the Gospel are responsible.
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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Here. All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.
C. S. Lewis
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The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact forewarmed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
C. S. Lewis
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The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility; rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.
C. S. Lewis
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What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.
C. S. Lewis
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The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
C. S. Lewis
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Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose; it is simply a description of what going back is like.
C. S. Lewis
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A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
C. S. Lewis
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Hitherto the plans of the educationalists have achieved very little of what they attempted, and indeed we may well thank the beneficent obstinacy of real mothers, real nurses, and (above all) real children for preserving the human race in such sanity as it still possesses.
C. S. Lewis
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At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says.
C. S. Lewis
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Literary Experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege of individuality.. .Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.
C. S. Lewis
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We're free Narnians, Hwin and I, and I suppose, if you're running away to Narnia you want to be one too. In that case Hwin isn't your horse any longer. One might just as well say you're her human.
C. S. Lewis
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A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
C. S. Lewis
