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What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
C. S. Lewis -
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
C. S. Lewis
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There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
C. S. Lewis -
Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.
C. S. Lewis -
People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.
C. S. Lewis -
I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?
C. S. Lewis -
We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.
C. S. Lewis -
Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...
C. S. Lewis
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This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
A sensible human once said, 'If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit'; and again, 'She's the sort of woman who lives for others-you can always tell the others by their hunted expression.'
C. S. Lewis -
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
This is where men, even the trustiest, fail us. Their heart is never so wholly given to any matter but that some trifle of a meal, or a drink, or a sleep, or a joke, or a girl, may come in between them and it, and then (even if you are a queen) you'll get no more good out of them until they've had their way.
C. S. Lewis
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Surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things.
C. S. Lewis -
But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.
C. S. Lewis -
There have been times when I think we do not desire heaven but more often I find myself wondering whether, in our heart of hearts, we have ever desired anything else.
C. S. Lewis -
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
C. S. Lewis
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The only people who object to escapism are jailers.
C. S. Lewis -
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 -
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.
C. S. Lewis -
Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
C. S. Lewis