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Fallen man is not simply an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms.
C. S. Lewis -
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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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 -
For prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted.
C. S. Lewis -
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed.
C. S. Lewis -
Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
C. S. Lewis -
Giant Wimbleweather burst into one of those not very intelligent laughs to which the nicer sort of Giants are so liable. He checked himself at once and looked as grace as a turnip by the time Reepicheep discovered where the noise came from.
C. S. Lewis -
Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
C. S. Lewis
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When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place [if we anticipate and look for it, rather than wallow in our 'supposed loss'. It can be helpful to think of the loss of that blessing as simply necessary to make way for another different blessing].
C. S. Lewis -
I believe, to be sure, that any man who reaches Heaven will find that what he abandoned (even in plucking out his right eye) has not been lost: that the kernel of what he was really seeking even in his most depraved wishes will be there, beyond expectation, waiting for him in 'the High Countries'.
C. S. Lewis -
There is no use in talking as if forgiveness were easy. For we find that the work of forgiveness has to be done over and over again.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.
C. S. Lewis -
The worst of sleeping out of doors is that you wake up so dreadfully early. And when you wake up you have to get up because the ground is so hard you are uncomfortable. And it makes matters worse if there is nothing but apples for breakfast and you have had nothing but apples for supper the night before.
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 -
Authority exercised with humility, and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. 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 -
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 -
Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
C. S. Lewis
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The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
C. S. Lewis -
If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
C. S. Lewis -
The whole journey was odd and dream-like -- the roaring stream, the wet grey grass, the glimmering cliffs which they were approaching, and always the glorious, silently pacing beast ahead.
C. S. Lewis -
Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it.
C. S. Lewis