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I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
C. S. Lewis
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If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.
C. S. Lewis
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Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
C. S. Lewis
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Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
C. S. Lewis
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'I wish I had never been born,' she said. 'What are we born for?' 'For infinite happiness,' said the Spirit. 'You can step out into it at any moment...'
C. S. Lewis
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All joy... emphasizes our pilgrim status; always reminds, beckons, awakens desire. Our best havings are wantings.
C. S. Lewis
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And she never could remember; and ever since that day what Lucy means by a good story is a story which reminds her of the forgotten story in the Magician's Book.
C. S. Lewis
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The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel.
C. S. Lewis
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There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
C. S. Lewis
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Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
C. S. Lewis
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What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.
C. S. Lewis
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I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, hoever, turns out to be not a state but a process.
C. S. Lewis
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Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
C. S. Lewis
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We must learn by experience to avoid either trains of thought or social situations which for us (not necessarily for everyone) lead to temptations. Like motoring-don't wait till the last moment before you put on the brakes but put them on, gently and quietly, while the danger is still a good way off.
C. S. Lewis
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What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favorable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these 'smug', commonplace neighbors at all.
C. S. Lewis
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A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
C. S. Lewis
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When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.
C. S. Lewis
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‘you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.’ ‘Some that thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the landlord.’
C. S. Lewis
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If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.
C. S. Lewis
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All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
C. S. Lewis
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If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
C. S. Lewis
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Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.
C. S. Lewis
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Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.
C. S. Lewis
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Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
C. S. Lewis
