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By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
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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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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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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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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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
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Of course it should be pointed out that, though all salvation is through Jesus, we need not conclude that he cannot save those who have not explicitly accepted him in this life.
C. S. Lewis
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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
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Few men looked on her without becoming, in a certain fashion, her lovers. But it was the kind of love that made them not less true, but truer, to their own wives.
C. S. Lewis
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A glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon.
C. S. Lewis
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And there’s also ‘To him that hath shall be given.’ After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can’t give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
C. S. Lewis
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Well!' said Puddleglum, rubbing his hands. 'This is just what I needed. If these chaps don't teach me to take a serious view of life, I don't know what will.
C. S. Lewis
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If conversion makes no improvements in a man's outward actions then I think his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.
C. S. Lewis
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Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.
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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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
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They were really getting quite fond of their strange pet and hoped that Aslan would allow them to keep it. The cleverer ones were quite sure by now that at least some of the noises which came out of his mouth had a meaning. They christened him Brandy because he made that noise so often.
C. S. Lewis
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The event of falling in love... in one high bound it has overleaped the massive wall of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being.
C. S. Lewis
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In Charn [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.
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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I gave up Christianity at about 14. Came back to it when getting on for 30. Not an emotional conversion; almost purely philosophical. I didn't want to. I'm not in the least a religious type. I want to be let alone, to feel I'm my own master; but since the facts seemed to be just the opposite, I had to give in.
C. S. Lewis
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Getting over a painful experience is much like crossing monkey bars. You have to let go at some point in order to move forward.
C. S. Lewis
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The proper motto is not Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but Be good sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than any other slackers.
C. S. Lewis
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And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
C. S. Lewis
