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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
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When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
C. S. Lewis
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Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.
C. S. Lewis
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There are two kinds of love: we love wise and kind and beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid and disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but He delights to give.
C. S. Lewis
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I expect you have seen someone put a a lighted match to a bit of newspaper which is propped up in a grate against an unlit fire. And for a second nothing seems to have happened; and then you notice a tiny steak of flame creeping along the edged of the newspaper. It was like that now.
C. S. Lewis
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Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam--he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
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
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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If I had really cared as I thought I did about the sorrows of the world I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came- I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me, now it matters and I find I didn't.
C. S. Lewis
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In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.
C. S. Lewis
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Jewel,' he said, 'what lies before us? Horrible thoughts arise in my heart. If we had died before today we should have been happy.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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Once you become aware that the main business that you are here for is to know God, most of life's problems fall into place of their own accord. J.I. Packer
C. S. Lewis
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To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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I don't want him to live forever, and I know that he's not going to live forever whether I want him to or not.
C. S. Lewis
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Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth.
C. S. Lewis
