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Edmund, who was becoming a nastier person every minute, thought that he had scored a great success, and went on at once to say, 'There she goes again. What's the matter with her?
C. S. Lewis
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There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
C. S. Lewis
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A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.
C. S. Lewis
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Once when I had remarked on the affection quite often found between cat and dog, my friend replied, "Yes. But I bet no dog would ever confess it to the other dogs.
C. S. Lewis
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Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.
C. S. Lewis
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Cobbles and kettledrums! ...I hope this madness isn't going to end in a moonlit climb and broken necks.
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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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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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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In coming to understand anything we are rejecting the facts as they are for us in favour of the facts as they are.
C. S. Lewis
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For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
C. S. Lewis
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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.
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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For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.
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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If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.
C. S. Lewis
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I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
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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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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Every good book should be entertaining. A good book will be more; it must not be less. Entertainment…is like a qualifying examination. If a fiction can’t provide that, we may be excused from inquiring into its higher qualities.
C. S. Lewis
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To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will most certainly be wrung and possibly broken ... The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
C. S. Lewis
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We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
C. S. Lewis
