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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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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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Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
C. S. Lewis
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Because God created the Natural - invented it out of His love and artistry - it demands our reverence.
C. S. Lewis
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The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.
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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Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.
C. S. Lewis
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Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
C. S. Lewis
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I think earth, if chosen instead of Heaven, will turn out to have been, all along, only a region in Hell; and earth, if put second to Heaven, to have been from the beginning a part of Heaven itself.
C. S. Lewis
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I have been wandering to find him and my happiness is so great that it even weakens me like a wound. And this is the marvel of marvels, that he called me Beloved, me who am but as a dog.
C. S. Lewis
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And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?
C. S. Lewis
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Which of the religions of the world gives to its followers the greatest happiness? While it lasts, the religion of worshiping oneself is best.
C. S. Lewis
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Anyone who endeavors to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. You are embarking on something that is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
C. S. Lewis
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To please God… to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness… to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son- it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is.
C. S. Lewis
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Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
C. S. Lewis
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A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world-and might be even more difficult to save.
C. S. Lewis
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Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot form their faces like barbedlightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expressioncould easily be mistaken for ferocity.
C. S. Lewis
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Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering, whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which will arise when lust has been killed.
C. S. Lewis
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We must picture Hell as a state where everyone is perpetually concerned about his own dignity and advancement, where everyone has a grievance, and where everyone lives the deadly serious passions of envy, self-importance, and resentment.
C. S. Lewis
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Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.
C. S. Lewis
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There is one bit of advice given us by the ancient Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money at interest; and lending money at interest - what we call investment - is the basis of our whole system.
C. S. Lewis
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Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
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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A concentrated mind and a sitting body make for better prayer than a kneeling body and a mind half asleep.
C. S. Lewis
