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The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.
C. S. Lewis
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Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.
C. S. Lewis
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And there, right in the middle of it, I find 'Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us.' There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
C. S. Lewis
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The promise, made when I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
C. S. Lewis
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There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.
C. S. Lewis
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I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
C. S. Lewis
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But if we admit God, must we admit Miracle? Indeed, indeed, you have no security against it. That is the bargain. Theology says to you in effect, 'Admit God and with Him the risk of a few miracles, and I in return will ratify your faith in uniformity as regards the overwhelming majority of events.
C. S. Lewis
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when pain is to be born, a little courage helps more than much knowledge, a little human sympathy more than much courage, and the least tincture of the love of God more than all.
C. S. Lewis
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Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old.
C. S. Lewis
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The Glory of God, and, as our only means of glorifying Him, the salvation of human souls, is the real business of life.
C. S. Lewis
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God's love is not wearied by our sins & is relentless in its determination that we be cured at whatever cost to us or Him
C. S. Lewis
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First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.
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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When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it, what will it be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then - that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it. You say you have poets in your world. Do they not teach you this?
C. S. Lewis
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I think we must attack -- wherever we meet it -- the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.
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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You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.
C. S. Lewis
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until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing.
C. S. Lewis
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For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
C. S. Lewis
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Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time." "Are they?" said the Professor; and Peter did not quite know what to say.
C. S. Lewis
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Only He who really lived a human life (and I presume that only one did) can fully taste the horror of death.
C. S. Lewis
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Prayer in the sense of petition, asking for things, is a small part of it; confession and penitence are its threshold, adoration its sanctuary, the presence and vision and enjoyment of God its bread and wine.
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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Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.
C. S. Lewis
