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It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis
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'God' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape.
C. S. Lewis
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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
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Away with tears and fears and troubles! United in wedlock with the eternal Godhead Itself, our nature ascends into the Heaven of Heavens. So it would be impious to call ourselves 'miserable.' On the contrary, Man is a creature whom the Angels-were they capable of envy-would envy. Let us lift up our hearts!
C. S. Lewis
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All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
C. S. Lewis
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If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
C. S. Lewis
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We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.
C. S. Lewis
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A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
C. S. Lewis
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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
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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
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What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. Highest Common Factor, and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
C. S. Lewis
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The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back to the simple principles, which we're so anxious not to see.
C. S. Lewis
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'Milton was right…' The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words 'Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven.' There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery…
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
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He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods.
C. S. Lewis
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There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.
C. S. Lewis
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'They would say,' he answered, 'that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.'
C. S. Lewis
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Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
C. S. Lewis
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All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
C. S. Lewis
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When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'
C. S. Lewis
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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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A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.
C. S. Lewis
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Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
C. S. Lewis
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It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.
C. S. Lewis
