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Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
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Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
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Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.
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And yet all loneliness, angers, hatreds, envies, and itchings that it contains, if rolled into one single experience and put into the scale against the least moment of the joy that is felt by the least in Heaven, would have no weight that could be registered at all. Bad cannot succeed even in being bad as truly as good is good.
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While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.
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I have seen landscapes . . . which, under a particular light, make me feel that at any moment a giant might raise his head over the next ridge.
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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.
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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.
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If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of prize which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone.
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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.
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Our temptation is to look eagerly for the minimum that will be accepted. We are in fact very like honest but reluctant taxpayers.
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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.
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The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.
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To see, in some measure, like God. His love and His knowledge are not distinct from one another, not from Him. We could almost say He sees because He loves, and therefore loves although He sees.
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For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
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His face had become very red and his mouth and fingers were sticky. He did not look either clever or handsome, whatever the Queen might say.
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If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation, then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
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There is no doctrine which I would more willingly remove from Christianity than the doctrine of hell, if it lay in my power. But it has the support of Scripture and, especially, of our Lord's own words; it has always been held by the Christian Church, and it has the support of reason.
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I wish I were younger. What inclines me now to think you may be right in regarding [evolution] as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders.
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The Scotch catechism says that man's chief end is 'to glorify God and enjoy Him forever.' But we shall then know that these are the same thing. Fully to enjoy is to glorify. In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
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Oh Trees, Trees, Trees...wake. Don't you remember it? Don't you remember me? Dryads and hamadryads, come out, come [out] to me.
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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.
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In those days Mr. Sherlock Holmes was still living in Baker Street and the Bastables were looking for treasure in the Lewisham Road.
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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.