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Wouldn't he know without being asked?' said Polly. 'I've no doubt he would,' said the Horse (still with his mouth full). 'But I've a sort of an idea he likes to be asked.
C. S. Lewis
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Surely you know that if a man can't be cured of churchgoing, the next best thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood looking for the church that "suits" him until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
C. S. Lewis
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What I like about experience is that it is such an honest thing. You may take any number of wrong turnings; but keep your eyes open and you will not be allowed to go very far before the warning signs appear. You may have deceived yourself, but experience is not trying to deceive you. The universe rings true wherever you fairly test it.
C. S. Lewis
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For in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you're taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.
C. S. Lewis
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I have swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms," said the Lion. It didn't say this as if it were boasting, nor as if it were sorry, nor as if it were angry. It just said it.
C. S. Lewis
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You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the univerise in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
C. S. Lewis
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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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A great many of those who 'debunk' traditional...values have in the background values of their own which they believe to be immune from the debunking process
C. S. Lewis
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We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing is more characteristically juvenile than contempt for juvenility. . . youth's characteristic chronological snobbery.
C. S. Lewis
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I read in a periodical the other day that the fundamental thing is how we think of God. By God Himself, it is not! How God thinks of us is not only more important, but infinitely more important.
C. S. Lewis
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If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival?
C. S. Lewis
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This is the land of Narnia,' said the Faun, 'where we are now; all that lies between the lamp-post and the great castle of Cair Paravel on the eastern sea.
C. S. Lewis
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The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.
C. S. Lewis
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Be sure that the ins and outs of your individuality are no mystery to Him; and one day they will no longer be a mystery to you.
C. S. Lewis
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Whatever you do, He will make good of it. But not the good He had prepared for you if you had obeyed him.
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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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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We treat our dogs as if they were "almost human": that is why they really become "almost human" in the end.
C. S. Lewis
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I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality. . . asking Him not to forgive me but to excuse me.
C. S. Lewis
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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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I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to "rejoice" as much as by anything else
C. S. Lewis
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Never, never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand; but do not try building a house on it.
C. S. Lewis
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Of course, we are to pray for spiritual awakening, and in various ways we can do something toward it. But we must remember that neither Paul nor Apollos gives the increase.
C. S. Lewis
