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A Great Deal Of What Is Being Published By Writers In The Religious Tradition Is A Scandal And Is Actually Turning People Away From The Church. The Liberal Writers Who Are Continually Accommodating And Whittling Down The Truth Of The Gospel Are Responsible.

-C. S. Lewis

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A Great Deal Of

C. S. Lewis

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A Great Deal Of What Is Being Published By Writers In The Religious Tradition Is A Scandal And Is Actually Turning People Away From The Church. The Liberal Writers Who Are Continually Accommodating And Whittling Down The Truth Of The Gospel Are Responsible.

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If There Is Equality It Is In His Love, Not In Us.

I Know All About The Despair Of Overcoming Chronic Temptation. It Is Not Serious, Provided Self-offended Petulance, Annoyance At Breaking Records, Impatience, Etc., Don't Get The Upper Hand. No Amount Of Falls Will Really Undo Us If We Keep Picking Ourselves Up Each Time...the Only Fatal Thing Is To Lose One's Temper And Give Up.

Always Winter But Never Christmas.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

The World Was Made Partly That There May Be Prayer; Partly That Our Prayers Might Be Answered.

Those Who Have Nothing Can Share Nothing; Those Who Are Going Nowhere Can Have No Fellow-travellers.

The Stamp Of The Saint Is That He Can Waive His Own Rights And Obey The Lord Jesus.

Humility, After The First Shock, Is Cheerful Virtue.

They Tell Me, Lord, That When I Seem To Be In Speech With You. Since But One Voice Is Heard, It

Don't Shine So That Others Can See You. Shine So That Through You, Others Can See Him.

The Christian Idea Of Marriage Is Based On Christ's Words That A Man And Wife Are To Be Regarded As A Single Organism - For That Is What The Words 'one Flesh' Would Be In Modern English. And The Christians Believe That When He Said This He Was Not Expressing A Sentiment But Stating A Fact - Just As One Is Stating A Fact When One Says That A Lock And Its Key Are One Mechanism, Or That A Violin And A Bow Are One Musical Instrument.

Is Any Pleasure On Earth As Great As A Circle Of Christian Friends?

No, I Don’t Wish I Knew Heaven Was Like The Picture In My Great Divorce, Because, If We Knew That, We Should Know It Was No Better. The Good Things Even Of This World Are Far Too Good Ever To Be Reached By Imagination. Even The Common Orange, You Know: No One Could Have Imagined It Before He Tasted It. How Much Less Heaven.

Of Course Language Is Not An Infallible Guide, But It Contains, With All Its Defects, A Good Deal Of Stored Insight And Experience.

No Book Is Really Worth Reading At The Age Of Ten Which Is Not Equally – And Often Far More – Worth Reading At The Age Of Fifty And Beyond.

A Pleasure Is Full Grown Only When It Is Remembered.

All Killing Is Not Murder Any More Than All Sexual Intercourse Is Adultery.

Once You Become Aware That The Main Business That You Are Here For Is To Know God, Most Of Life's Problems Fall Into Place Of Their Own Accord. J.i. Packer Aim At Heaven And You Will Get Earth Thrown In. Aim At Earth And You Will Get Neither.

Atheism Turns Out To Be Too Simple. If The Whole Universe Has No Meaning, We Should Never Have Found Out That It Has No Meaning.

Without The Aid Of Trained Emotions The Intellect Is Powerless Against The Animal Organism.

Friends Are Seldom Found; They Are Made.

Have You Not Seen That In Our Days Of Any Whose Story, Song Or Art Delights Us, Our Sincerest Praise Means, When All's Said, 'you Break My Heart?

A Cold, Self-righteous Prig Who Goes Regularly To Church May Be Far Nearer To Hell Than A Prostitute.

Of Course God Does Not Consider You Hopeless. If He Did He Would Not Be Moving You To Seek Him (and He Obviously Is). What Is Going On In You At Present Is Simply The Beginning Of The Treatment. Continue Seeking With Cheerful Seriousness. Unless He Wanted You, You Would Not Be Wanting Him.

I Wrote This Story For You, But When I Began It I Had Not Realized That Girls Grow Quicker Than Books. As A Result You Are Already Too Old For Fairy Tales, And By The Time It Is Printed And Bound You Will Be Older Still. But Some Day You Will Be Old Enough To Start Reading Fairy Tales Again. You Can Then Take It Down From Some Upper Shelf, Dust It, And Tell Me What You Think Of It. I Shall Probably Be Too Deaf To Hear, And Too Old To Understand A Word You Say, But I Shall Still Be Your Affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis.

Many Things Have Gone Wrong With The World That God Made And... God Insists, And Insists Very Loudly, On Our Putting Them Right Again

You're A Mere Chick. I Remember You When You Were A Egg. Don't Come Trying To Teach Me, Sir. Crabs And Crumpets!

While We Are Actually Subjected To Them, The 'moods' And 'spirits' Of Nature Point No Morals. Overwhelming Gaiety, Insupportable Grandeur, Sombre Desolation Are Flung At You. Make What You Can Of Them, If You Must Make At All. The Only Imperative That Nature Utters Is, 'look. Listen. Attend.

Read And Re-read--"re-reading, We Always Find A New Book.

Like A Good Chess Player, Satan Is Always Trying To Maneuver You Into A Position Where You Can Save Your Castle Only By Losing Your Bishop.

Our Passions Are Not Too Strong, They Are Too Weak. We Are Far Too Easily Pleased.

There Must, Whether The Gods See It Or Not, Be Something Great In The Mortal Soul. For Suffering, It Seems, Is Infinite, And Our Capacity Without Limit.

But The Most Obvious Fact About Praise — Whether Of God Or Anything — Strangely Escaped Me. I Thought Of It In Terms Of Compliment, Approval, Or The Giving Of Honor. I Had Never Noticed That All Enjoyment Spontaneously Overflows Into Praise Unless (sometimes Even If) Shyness Or The Fear Of Boring Others Is Deliberately Brought In To Check It.

But The Great Thing To Remember Is That, Though Our Feelings Come And Go, His Love For Us Does Not. It Is Not Wearied By Our Sins, Or Our Indifference; And, Therefore, It Is Quite Relentless In Its Determination That We Shall Be Cured Of Those Sins, At Whatever Cost To Us, At Whatever Cost To Him.

Don't Say It Was "delightful"; Make Us Say "delightful" When We've Read The Description.

Christian Theology Can Fit In Science, Art, Morality, And The Sub-christian Religious. The Scientific Point Of View Cannot Fit Any Of These Things, Not Even Science Itself.

Never Exaggerate. Never Say More Than You Really Mean.

How Difficult It Is To Avoid Having A Special Standard For Oneself.

We Don't Have A Soul. We Are A Soul. We Happen To Have A Body.

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.

People Shouldn't Call For Demons Unless They Really Mean What They Say.

The Road To The Promised Land Runs Past Sinai. The Moral Law May Exist To Be Transcended: But There Is No Transcending It For Those Who Have Not First Admitted Its Claims Up On Them, And Then Tried With All Their Strength To Meet That Claim, And Fairly And Squarely Faced The Fact Of Their Failure.

‎"don't Bother Too Much About Your Feelings. When They Are Humble, Loving, Brave, Give Thanks For Them; When They Are Conceited, Selfish, Cowardly, Ask To Have Them Altered. In Neither Case Are They You, But Only A Thing That Happens To You. What Matters Is Your Intentions And Your Behavior

Got To Start By Finding It, Have We? Can't Start By Looking For It, I Suppose?

Odd, The Way The Less The Bible Is Read The More It Is Translated

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.

It Takes All Sorts To Make A World; Or A Church. This May Be Even Truer Of A Church. If Grace Perfects Nature It Must Expand All Our Natures Into The Full Richness Of The Diversity Which God Intended When He Made Them, And Heaven Will Display Far More Variety Than Hell.

Some People Probably Think Of The Resurrection As A Desperate Last Moment Expedient To Save The Hero From A Situation Which Had Got Out Of The Author's Control.

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.

Falling In Love

I Know Now, Lord, Why You Utter No Answer. You Are Yourself The Answer. Before Your Face Questions Die Away. What Other Answer Would Suffice?

Perhaps The Experience Had Been So Complete That Repetition Would Be Vulgarity - Like Asking To Hear The Same Symphony Twice In A Day.

If One Could Run Without Getting Tired I Don't Think One Would Often Want To Do Anything Else.

It Is Funny How Mortals Always Picture Us As Putting Things Into Their Minds: In Reality Our Best Work Is Done By Keeping Things Out.

Democracy Demands That Little Men Should Not Take Big Ones Too Seriously; It Dies When It Is Full Of Little Men Who Think They Are Big Themselves.

The Theory That Thought Is Merely A Movement In The Brain Is, In My Opinion, Nonsense; For If So, That Theory Itself Would Be Merely A Movement, An Event Among Atoms, Which May Have Speed And Direction But Of Which It Would Be Meaningless To Use The Words 'true' Or 'false'.

One Road Leads Home And A Thousand Roads Lead Into The Wilderness.

The Next Best Thing To Being Wise Oneself Is To Live In A Circle Of Those Who Are.

For Me, Reason Is The Natural Organ Of Truth; But Imagination Is The Organ Of Meaning. Imagination, Producing New Metaphors Or Revivifying Old, Is Not The Cause Of Truth, But Its Condition.

It Matters Enormously If I Alienate Anyone From The Truth.

We Were Promised Sufferings. They Were Part Of The Program. We Were Even Told, 'blessed Are They That Mourn,' And I Accept It. I've Got Nothing That I Hadn't Bargained For. Of Course It Is Different When The Thing Happens To Oneself, Not To Others, And In Reality, Not Imagination.

The Point Is That For Our Ancestors, The Universe Was A Picture; For Modern Physics It Is A Story.

Nature Does Not Teach. A True Philosophy May Sometimes Validate An Experience Of Nature; An Experience Of Nature Cannot Validate A Philosophy. Nature Will Not Verify Any Theological Or Metaphysical Proposition (or Not In The Manner We Are Now Considering); She Will Help To Show What It Means.

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.

Term, Holidays, Term, Holidays, Till We Leave School, And Then Work, Work, Work Till We Die.

There Is No Neutral Ground In The Universe. Every Square Inch, Every Split Second Is Claimed By God, And Counterclaimed By Satan.

Friendship Is...the Sort Of Love One Can Imagine Between Angels.

It Is A Very Funny Thing That The Sleepier You Are, The Longer You Take About Getting To Bed.

The Christian And The Materialist Hold Different Beliefs About The Universe. They Can't Both Be Right. The One Who Is Wrong Will Act In A Way Which Simply Doesn't Fit The Real Universe. Consequently, With The Best Will In The World, He Will Be Helping His Fellow Creatures To Their Destruction.

Life Is Too Deep For Words, So Don't Try To Describe It, Just Live It.

Self Improvement

There Are No Ordinary People.. It Is Immortals Whom We Joke With, Work With, Marry, Snub, And Exploit.

This Is The Land Of Narnia,' Said The Faun, 'where We Are Now; All That Lies Between The Lamp-post And The Great Castle Of Cair Paravel On The Eastern Sea.

That Is Why Christians Are Told Not To Judge. We See Only The Results Which A Man's Choices Make Out Of His Raw Material. But God Does Not Judge Him On The Raw Material At All, But On What He Has Done With It.

Of Course God Does Not Consider You Hopeless. If He Did, He Would Not Be Moving You To Seek Him (and He Obviously Is)... Continue Seeking Him With Seriousness. Unless He Wanted You, You Would Not Be Wanting Him.

The Demand Of The Loveless And The Self-imprisoned That They Should Be Allowed To Blackmail The Universe: That Till They Consent To Be Happy (on Their Own Terms) No One Else Shall Taste Joy: That Theirs Should Be The Final Power; That Hell Should Be Able To Veto Heaven.

For In Grief Nothing 'stays Put.' One Keeps On Emerging From A Phase, But It Always Recurs. Round And Round. Everything Repeats. Am I Going In Circles, Or Dare I Hope I Am On A Spiral?

Liking An Author May Be As Involuntary And Improbable As Falling In Love.

Falling In Love

One Of The Marks Of A Certain Type Of Bad Man Is That He Cannot Give Up A Thing Himself Without Wanting Every One Else To Give It Up. That Is Not The Christian Way. An Individual Christian May See Fit To Give Up All Sorts Of Things For Special Reasons--marriage, Or Meat, Or Beer, Or The Cinema; But The Moment He Starts Saying The Things Are Bad In Themselves, Or Looking Down His Nose At Other People Who Do Use Them, He Has Taken The Wrong Turning.

Good And Evil Both Increase At Compound Interest. That Is Why The Little Decisions You And I Make Every Day Are Of Such Infinite Importance. The Smallest Good Act Today Is The Capture Of A Strategic Point From Which, A Few Months Later, You May Be Able To Go On To Victories You Never Dreamed Of. An Apparently Trivial Indulgence In Lust Or Anger Today Is The Loss Of A Ridge Or Railway Line Or Bridgehead From Which The Enemy May Launch An Attack Otherwise Impossible.

My Own View Is That The Churches Should Frankly Recognise That The Majority Of The British People Are Not Christians And, Therefore, Cannot Be Expected To Live Christian Lives. There Ought To Be Two Distinct Kinds Of Marriage: One Governed By The State With Rules Enforced On All Citizens, The Other Governed By The Church With Rules Enforced By Her On Her Own Members." --about The Only Statement I Agree With In This Book

The Psalmists In Telling Everyone To Praise God Are Doing What All Men Do When They Speak Of What They Care About.

If Naturalism Were True Then All Thoughts Whatever Would Be Wholly The Result Of Irrational Causes. It Cuts Its Own Throat.

A Noble Hunger, Long Unsatisfied, Met At Last Its Proper Food.

For Prayer Is Request. The Essence Of Request, As Distinct From Compulsion, Is That It May Or May Not Be Granted.

Even In This World Of Course It Is The Stupidest Children Who Are Most Childish And The Stupidest Grown-ups Who Are Most Grown-up.

His Face Had Become Very Red And His Mouth And Fingers Were Sticky. He Did Not Look Either Clever Or Handsome, Whatever The Queen Might Say.

In Such A Fearful World, We Need A Fearless Church

We Who Have Been True Readers All Our Life Fully Realize The Enormous Of Our Being Which We Owe To Authors.

Most People Spend Most Of Their Lives Doing Neither What They Want To Be Doing Nor What They Ought To Be Doing.

When A Man Is Getting Better He Understands More And More Clearly The Evil That Is Still Left In Him. When A Man Is Getting Worse He Understands His Own Badness Less And Less.

I Think We Must Attack -- Wherever We Meet It -- The Nonsensical Idea That Mutually Exclusive Propositions About God Can Both Be True.

Love Anything And Your Heart Will Be Wrung And Possibly Broken. If You Want To Make Sure Of Keeping It Intact You Must Give It To No One, Not Even An Animal.

I Want God, Not My Idea Of God.

I Would Say If A Man Is Going To Write On Chemistry, He Learns Chemistry. The Same Is True Of Christianity. But To Speak Of The Craft Itself, I Would Not Know How To Advise A Man How To Write. It Is A Matter Of Talent And Interest. I Believe He Must Be Strongly Moved If He Is To Become A Writer. 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.

A Tyrannous And Gluttonous Demand For Affection Can Be A Horrible Thing. But In Ordinary Life No One Calls A Child Selfish Because It Turns For Comfort To Its Mother; Nor An Adult Who Turns To His Fellow "for Company." Those, Whether Children Or Adults, Who Do So Least Are Not Usually The Most Selfless.

A Man Who Was Merely A Man And Said The Sort Of Things Jesus Said Would Not Be A Great Moral Teacher. He Would Either Be A Lunatic - On A Level With The Man Who Says He Is A Poached Egg - Or Else He Would Be The Devil Of Hell. You Must Make Your Choice. Either This Man Was, And Is, The Son Of God; Or Else A Madman Or Something Worse. You Can Shut Him Up For A Fool; You Can Spit At Him And Kill Him As A Demon; Or You Can Fall At His Feet And Call Him Lord And God. But Let Us Not Come With Any Patronizing Nonsense About His Being A Great Human Teacher. He Has Not Left That Open To Us.

Getting Over A Painful Experience Is Much Like Crossing Monkey Bars. You Have To Let Go At Some Point In Order To Move Forward.

Any Patch Of Sunlight In A Wood Will Show You Something About The Sun Which You Could Never Get From Reading Books On Astronomy. These Pure And Spontaneous Pleasures Are ‘patches Of Godlight’ In The Woods Of Our Experience.

For Most Of Us The Prayer In Gethsemane Is The Only Model. Removing Mountains Can Wait.

Art Can Teach Without At All Ceasing To Be Art.

The Only Way To Drive Out Bad Culture Is To Create Good Culture. We Need To Recognize That Artistic Talent Is A Gift From The Lord - And That Developing Those Talents Is The Only Way To Create Good Culture.

A Christian Is Not Someone Who Never Goes Wrong, But One Who Is Enabled To Repent And Pick Himself Up And Begin Again, Because The Christ-life Is Inside Him.

God Doesn't Want Something From Us. He Simply Wants Us.

Long Before History Began We Men Have Got Together Apart From The Women And Done Things. We Had Time.

The Road To The Promised Land Runs Past Sinai.

When The Author Walks On The Stage The Play Is Over. God Is Going To Invade, All Right...something So Beautiful To Some Of Us And So Terrible To Others That None Of Us Will Have Any Choice Left? For This Time It Will Be God Without Disguise...it Will Be Too Late Then To Choose Your Side. There Is No Use Saying You Choose To Lie Down When It Has Become Impossible To Stand Up.

One Always Feel Better When One Has Made Up One's Mind.

Do Not Waste Time Bothering Whether You ‘love’ Your Neighbor; Act As If You Did. As Soon As We Do This We Find One Of The Great Secrets. When You Are Behaving As If You Loved Someone, You Will Presently Come To Love Him.

You Will Say These Are Very Small Sins... [but] It Does Not Matter How Small The Sins Are Provided That Their Cumulative Effect Is To Edge The Man Away From The Light And Out Into The Nothing. Murder Is No Better Than Cards If Cards Can Do The Trick. Indeed, The Safest Road To Hell Is The Gradual One--the Gentle Slope, Soft Underfoot, Without Sudden Turnings, Without Milestones, Without Signposts

The First Demand Any Work Of Art Makes Upon Us Is To Surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get Yourself Out Of The Way.

The Vice I Am Talking Of Is Pride Or Self-conceit: And The Virtue Opposite To It, In Christian Morals, Is Called Humility...according To Christian Teachers, The Essential Vice, The Utmost Evil, Is Pride. Unchastity, Anger, Greed, Drunkenness, And All That, Are Mere Flea Bites In Comparison: It Was Through Pride That The Devil Became The Devil: Pride Leads To Every Other Vice: It Is The Complete Anti-god State Of Mind.

Heaven, Once Attained, Will Work Backwards And Turn Even Agony Into A Glory

A Man Does Not Call A Line Crooked Unless He Has Some Idea Of A Straight Line.

You Understand Sleep When You Are Awake, Not While You Are Sleeping. You Can See Mistakes In Arithmetic When Your Mind Is Working Properly; While You Are Making Them You Cannot See Them. Good People Know About Both Bad And Evil; Bad People Do Not Know About Either.

If You Have A Religion It Must Be Cosmic.

Anger Is The Fluid Love Bleeds When Cut.

Friendship Love

He Who Has God And Everything Else Has No More Than He Who Has God Only.

Bad Art Is Never Really Enjoyed In The Same Sense In Which Good Art Is Enjoyed. It Is Only "liked": It Never Startles, Prostrates, And Takes Captive.

Well, Sir, If Things Are Real, They’re There All The Time." "are They?" Said The Professor; And Peter Did Not Quite Know What To Say.

Seek Unity And You Will Find Neither Unity Nor Truth.seek The Light Of Truth, And You Will Find Unity And Truth.

When The Voice Of Your Friend Or The Page Of Your Book Sinks Into Democratic Equality With The Pattern Of The Wallpaper, The Feel Of Your Clothes, Your Memory Of Last Night, And The Noises From The Road, You Are Falling Asleep. The Highly Selective Consciousness Enjoyed By Fully Alert Men, With All Its Builded Sentiments And Consecrated Ideals, Has As Much To Be Called Real As The Drowsy Chaos, And More.

And How Could We Endure To Live And Let Time Pass If We Were Always Crying For One Day Or One Year To Come Back--if We Did Not Know That Every Day In A Life Fills The Whole Life With Expectation And Memory And That These Are That Day?

Spiteful Words Can Hurt Your Feelings But Silence Breaks Your Heart.

All Is Summed Up In The Prayer Which A Young Female Human Is Said To Have Uttered Recently: "o God, Make Me A Normal Twentieth-century Girl!" Thanks To Our Labors, This Will Mean Increasingly: "make Me A Minx, A Moron, And A Parasite.

Omnipotence Means Power To Do All That Is Intrinsically Possible, Not To Do The Intrinsically Impossible. You May Attribute Miracles To Him, But Not Nonsense.

Our Struggle Is--isn't It?--to Achieve And Retain Faith On A Lower Level. To Believe That There Is A Listener At All. For As The Situation Grows More And More Desperate, The Grisly Fears Intrude. Are We Only Talking To Ourselves In An Empty Universe? The Silence Is Often So Emphatic. And We Have Prayed So Much Already

Obedience Is The Road To Freedom, Humility The Road To Pleasure, Unity The Road To Personality.

No Great Wisdom Can Be Reached Without Sacrifice.

Without Sacrifice

God Wants A Child's Heart And A Grownup's Head.

Q. What Is Your View Of The Daily Discipline Of The Christian Life - The Need For Taking Time To Be Alone With God? Lewis: "we Have Our New Testament Regimental Orders Upon The Subject. I Would Take It For Granted That Everyone Who Becomes A Christian Would Undertake This Practice. It Is Enjoined Upon Us By Our Lord; And Since They Are His Commands, I Believe In Following Them. It Is Always Just Possible That Jesus Christ Meant What He Said When He Told Us To Seek The Secret Place And To Close The Door.

No Good Work Is Done Anywhere Without Aid From The Father Of Lights.

But I Remember More Dearly Autumn Afternoons In Bottoms That Lay Intensely Silent Under Old Great Trees

Some Journeys Take Us Far From Home. Some Adventures Lead Us To Our Destiny.

If You Love Deeply, You're Going To Get Hurt Badly. But It's Still Worth It.

This Is Our Dilemma--either To Taste And Not To Know Or To Know And Not To Taste--or, More Strictly, To Lack One Kind Of Knowledge Because We Are In An Experience Or To Lack Another Kind Because We Are Outside It. [. . .] Of This Tragic Dilemma Myth Is The Partial Solution. In The Enjoyment Of A Great Myth We Come Nearest To Experiencing As A Concrete What Can Otherwise Be Understood Only As An Abstraction.

Daughter Of Eve From The Far Land Of Spare Oom Where Eternal Summer Reigns Around The Bright City Of War Drobe, How Would It Be If You Came And Had Tea With Me?

I Think God Wants Us To Love Him More, Not To Love Others Less.

A Moderately Bad Man Knows He Is Not Very Good: A Thoroughly Bad Man Thinks He Is Alright. This Is Common Sense Really. You Understand Sleep When You Are Awake, Not Well You Are Sleeping.

We Have A Strange Illusion That Mere Time Cancels Sin. I Have Heard Others, And I Have Heard Myself, Recounting Cruelties And Falsehoods Committed In Boyhood As If They Were No Concern Of The Present Speaker's, And Even With Laughter. But Mere Time Does Nothing Either To The Fact Or To The Guilt Of A Sin. The Guilt Is Washed Out Not By Time But By Repentance And The Blood Of Christ: If We Have Repented These Early Sins We Should Remember The Price Of Our Forgiveness And Be Humble.

The Mouse Is A Fair Treat But This One Would Talk The Hind Legs Off A Donkey.

I Have Swallowed Up Girls And Boys, Women And Men, Kings And Emperors, Cities And Realms," Said The Lion. It Didn't Say This As If It Were Boasting, Nor As If It Were Sorry, Nor As If It Were Angry. It Just Said It.

To Every Soul, God Will Look Like Its First Love Because He Is Its First Love. Your Place In Heaven Will Seem To Be Made For You And You Alone, Because You Were Made For It - Made For It Stitch By Stitch As A Glove Is Made For A Hand.

The Whole Journey Was Odd And Dream-like -- The Roaring Stream, The Wet Grey Grass, The Glimmering Cliffs Which They Were Approaching, And Always The Glorious, Silently Pacing Beast Ahead.

Friendship Is The Instrument By Which God Reveals To Each Of Us The Beauties Of Others.

The Human Heart Is Not Unchanging (nay, Changes Almost Out Of Recognition In The Twinkling Of An Eye).

The Proper Aim Of Giving Is To Put The Recipient In A State Where He No Longer Needs Our Gift.

Nothing Is More Likely To Destroy A Species Or A Nation Than A Determination To Survive At All Costs

Lust Is A Poor, Weak, Whimpering, Whispering Thing Compared With That Richness And Energy Of Desire Which Will Arise When Lust Has Been Killed.

Aslan" Said Lucy "you're Bigger". "that Is Because You Are Older, Little One" Answered He. "not Because You Are?" "i Am Not. But Every Year You Grow, You Will Find Me Bigger".

God Became Man To Turn Creatures Into Sons: Not Simply To Produce Better Men Of The Old Kind But To Produce A New Kind Of Man. It Is Not Like Teaching A Horse To Jump Better And Better But Like Turning A Horse Into A Winged Creature.

If You Have Once Accepted Christianity, Then Some Of Its Main Doctrines Shall Be Deliberately Held Before Your Mind For Some Time Every Day. That Is Why Daily Prayers And Religious Reading And Churchgoing Are Necessary Parts Of The Christian Life. 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.

Ideally, We Should Like To Define A Good Book As One Which 'permits, Invites, Or Compels' Good Reading

100 Per Cent Of Us Die, And The Percentage Cannot Be Increased.

Anyone Who Is Honestly Trying To Be A Christian Will Soon Find His Intelligence Being Sharpened: One Of The Reasons Why It Needs No Special Education To Be A Christian Is That Christianity Is An Education Itself. That Is Why An Uneducated Believer Like Bunyan Was Able To Write A Book That Has Astonished The Whole World.

Mental Pain Is Less Dramatic Than Physical Pain, But It Is More Common And Also More Hard To Bear. The Frequent Attempt To Conceal Mental Pain Increases The Burden: It Is Easier To Say “my Tooth Is Aching” Than To Say “my Heart Is Broken.

I Have Been Trying To Make The Reader Believe That We Actually Are, At Present, Creatures Whose Character Must Be, In Some Respects, A Horror To God, As It Is, When We Really See It, A Horror To Ourselves. This I Believe To Be A Fact: And I Notice That The Holier A Man Is, The More Fully He Is Aware Of That Fact.

Love Is Never Wasted, For Its Value Does Not Rest Upon Reciprocity.

The Great Thing To Remember Is That Though Our Feelings Come And Go God's Love For Us Does Not.

Christian Inspirational

Friendship Is The Greatest Of Worldly Goods. Certainly To Me It Is The Chief Happiness Of Life.

We Must Picture Hell As A State Where Everyone Is Perpetually Concerned About His Own Dignity And Advancement, Where Everyone Has A Grievance, And Where Everyone Lives The Deadly Serious Passions Of Envy, Self-importance, And Resentment.

The Long, Dull, Monotonous Years Of Middle-aged Prosperity Or Middle-aged Adversity Are Excellent Campaigning Weather For The Devil.

I Wish We Didn't Live In A World Where Buying And Selling Things Seems To Have Become Almost More Important Than Either Producing Or Using Them.

Aristotle Said That Some People Were Only Fit To Be Slaves. I Do Not Contradict Him. But I Reject Slavery Because I See No Men Fit To Be Masters.

There Are No Ordinary People. You Have Never Talked To A Mere Mortal. Nations, Cultures, Arts, Civilizations--these Are Mortal, And Their Life Is To Ours As The Life Of A Gnat.

God Is Basic Fact. He Must Not Be Thought Of As A Featureless Generality. He Is The Most Concrete Thing There Is.

Love Is The Great Conqueror Of Lust.

You Can Give The Devil Too Much Or Too Little Attention.

...we Sacrifice Other Species To Our Own Not Because Our Own Has Any Objective Metaphysical Privilege Over Others, But Simply Because It Is Ours. It May Be Very Natural To Have This Loyalty To Our Own Species, But Let Us Hear No More From The Naturalists About The "sentimentality" Of Anti-vivisectionists. If Loyalty To Our Own Species - Preference For Man Simply Because We Are Men - Is Not Sentiment, Then What Is?

And Since We Cannot Deceive The Whole Human Race All The Time, It Is Most Important Thus To Cut Every Generation Off From All Others; For Where Learning Makes A Free Commerce Between The Ages There Is Always The Danger That The Characteristic Errors Of One May Be Corrected By The Characteristic Truths Of Another.

There Is Nothing Like Suspense And Anxiety For Barricading A Human's Mind Against The Enemy. He Wants Men To Be Concerned With What They Do; Our Business Is To Keep Them Thinking About What Will Happen To Them.

We Never Find Out The Strength Of The Evil Impulse Inside Us Until We Try To Fight It.

Pride Gets No Pleasure Out Of Having Something, Only Out Of Having More Of It Than The Next Man... It Is The Comparison That Makes You Proud: The Pleasure Of Being Above The Rest. Once The Element Of Competition Is Gone, Pride Is Gone.

Wherever Any Precept Of Traditional Morality Is Simply Challenged To Produce Its Credentials, As Though The Burden Of Proof Lay On It, We Have Taken The Wrong Position.

Burden Of Proof

We Are Forbidden To Neglect The Assembling Of Ourselves Together. Christianity Is Already Institutional In The Earliest Of Its Documents. The Church Is The Bride Of Christ. We Are Members Of One Another.

If You Could See Humanity Spread Out In Time, As God Sees It, It Would Look Like One Single Growing Thing-rather Like A Very Complicated Tree. Every Individual Would Appear Connected With Every Other.

Very Often What God First Helps Us Towards Is Not The Virtue Itself But Just This Power Of Always Trying Again.

Mortal Lovers Must Not Try To Remain At The First Step; For Lasting Passion Is The Dream Of A Harlot And From It We Wake In Despair.

Critics Who Treat Adult As A Term Of Approval, Instead Of As A Merely Descriptive Term, Cannot Be Adult Themselves.

This Act [creation], As It Is For God, Must Always Remain Totally Inconceivable To Man. For We--even Our Poets And Musicians And Inventors--never, In The Ultimate Sense Make. We Only Build. We Always Have Materials To Build From. All We Can Know About The Act Of Creation Must Be Derived From What We Can Gather About The Relation Of The Creatures To Their Creator

You Ask Whether I Have Ever Been In Love: Fool As I Am, I Am Not Such A Fool As That. But If One Is Only To Talk From First-hand Experience, Conversation Would Be A Very Poor Business. But Though I Have No Personal Experience Of The Things They Call Love, I Have What Is Better - The Experience Of Sappho, Of Euripides, Of Catallus, Of Shakespeare, Of Spenser, Of Austen, Of Bronte, Of Anyone Else I Have Read.

Catch {a Man} At The Moment When He Is Really Poor In Spirit And Smuggle Into His Mind The Gratifying Reflection, "by Jove, I'm Being Humble," And Almost Immediately Pride - Pride At His Own Humility - Will Appear.

I Pray Because I Can't Help Myself. I Pray Because I'm Helpless. It Doesn't Change God - It Changes Me.

The Difference [god's] Timelessness Makes Is That This Now (which Slips Away From You Even As You Say The Word Now) Is For Him Infinite.

I Wonder Do The Gods Know What It Feels Like To Be A Man.

You Cannot Make Men Good By Law: And Without Good Men You Cannot Have A Good Society.

No Man Who Values Originality Will Ever Be Original. But Try To Tell The Truth As You See It, Try To Do Any Bit Of Work As Well As It Can Be Done For The Work's Sake, And What Men Call Originality Will Come Unsought.

Since I Am I, I Must Make An Act Of Self-surrender, However Small Or However Easy, In Living To God Rather Than To My Self.

To Love At All Is To Be Vulnerable.

Grief Is Like A Bomber Circling Round And Dropping Its Bombs Each Time The Circle Brings It Overhead; Physical Pain Is Like The Steady Barrage On A Trench In World War One, Hours If It With No Let-up For A Moment. Thought Is Never Static Pain Often Is... Is It Not Yet Enough?

You Are Guilty Of No Evil, Ransom Of Thulcandra, Except A Little Fearfulness. For That, The Journey You Go On Is Your Pain, And Perhaps Your Cure: For You Must Be Either Mad Or Brave Before It Is Ended.

God Is The Only Comfort, He Is Also The Supreme Terror: The Thing We Most Need And The Thing We Most Want To Hide From.

Every Sin Is The Distortion Of An Energy Breathed Into Us - An Energy Which, If Not Thus Distorted, Would Have Blossomed Into One Of Those Holy Acts Whereof 'god Did It' And 'i Did It' Are Both True Descriptions.

We Are Half-hearted Creatures, Fooling About With Drink And Sex And Ambition When Infinite Joy Is Offered Us.

The True Enjoyments Must Be Spontaneous And Compulsive And Look To No Remoter End.

The More Imagination The Reader Has ... The More He Will Do For Himself. He Will, At A Mere Hint From The Author, Flood Wretched Material With Suggestion And Never Guess That He Is Himself Chiefly Making What He Enjoys.

If Christianity Was Something We Were Making Up, Of Course We Could Make It Easier. But It Is Not. We Cannot Compete, In Simplicity With People Who Are Inventing Religions. How Could We? We Are Dealing With Fact. Of Course Anyone Can Be Simple If He Has No Facts To Bother About.

When You Are Happy, So Happy You Have No Sense Of Needing Him, So Happy That You Are Tempted To Feel His Claims Upon You As An Interruption, If You Remember Yourself And Turn To Him With Gratitude And Praise, You Will Be — Or So It Feels— Welcomed With Open Arms. But Go To Him When Your Need Is Desperate, When All Other Help Is Vain, And What Do You Find? A Door Slammed In Your Face, And A Sound Of Bolting And Double Bolting On The Inside. After That, Silence.

They Say, 'the Coward Dies Many Times'; So Does The Beloved. Didn't The Eagle Find A Fresh Liver To Tear In Prometheus Every Time It Dined?

A Pleasure Is Full Grown Only When It Is Remembered. You Are Speaking, Hmán, As If Pleasure Were One Thing And The Memory Another. It Is All One Thing.

And I Was The Lion You Do Not Remember Who Pushed The Boat In Which You Lay, A Child Near Death, So That It Came To Shore Where A Man Sat, Wakeful At Midnight, To Receive You.

I Think Earth, If Chosen Instead Of Heaven, Will Turn Out To Have Been, All Along, Only A Region In Hell; And Earth, If Put Second To Heaven, To Have Been From The Beginning A Part Of Heaven Itself.

Who Will Take Medicine Unless He Knows He Is In The Grip Of Disease?

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