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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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God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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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I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstairs indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.
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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We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism--the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.
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
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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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Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.
C. S. Lewis
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The dangers of apparent self-sufficiency explain why Our Lord regards the vices of the feckless and dissipated so much more leniently than the vices that lead to worldly success.
C. S. Lewis
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The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.
C. S. Lewis
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I sometimes pray not for self-knowledge in general but for just so much self knowledge at the moment as I can bear and use at the moment; the little daily dose.
C. S. Lewis
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The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just that time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.'
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Better to be miserable with her than happy without her. Let our hearts break provided they break together. If the voice within us does not say this it is not the voice of Eros.
C. S. Lewis
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I think we must fully face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much better, it makes him very much worse... Conversion may make of one who was, if no better, no worse than an animal, something like a devil.
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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The rule of the universe is that others can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, and one can paddle every canoe except one's own.
C. S. Lewis
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I felt ashamed." "But of what? Psyche, they hadn't stripped you naked or anything?" "No, no, Maia. Ashamed of looking like a mortal -- of being a mortal." "But how could you help that?" "Don't you think the things people are most ashamed of are things they can't help?
C. S. Lewis
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Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.
C. S. Lewis
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Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.
C. S. Lewis
