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Friendship Exhibits A Glorious "nearness By Resemblance" To Heaven Itself Where The Very Multitude Of The Blessed (which No Man Can Number) Increases The Fruition Which Each Has Of God. For Every Soul, Seeing Him In Her Own Way, Doubtless Communicates That Unique Vision To All The Rest. That, Says An Old Author, Is Why The Seraphim In Isaiah's Vision Are Crying "holy, Holy, Holy" To One Another (isaiah Vi, 3). The More We Thus Share The Heavenly Bread Between Us, The More We Shall All Have.

-C. S. Lewis

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Friendship Exhibits A Glorious

C. S. Lewis

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Friendship Exhibits A Glorious "nearness By Resemblance" To Heaven Itself Where The Very Multitude Of The Blessed (which No Man Can Number) Increases The Fruition Which Each Has Of God. For Every Soul, Seeing Him In Her Own Way, Doubtless Communicates That Unique Vision To All The Rest. That, Says An Old Author, Is Why The Seraphim In Isaiah's Vision Are Crying "holy, Holy, Holy" To One Another (isaiah Vi, 3). The More We Thus Share The Heavenly Bread Between Us, The More We Shall All Have.

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To See, In Some Measure, Like God. His Love And His Knowledge Are Not Distinct From One Another, Not From Him. We Could Almost Say He Sees Because He Loves, And Therefore Loves Although He Sees.

I Wish They Would Remember That The Charge To Peter Was "feed My Sheep", Not "try Experiments On My Rats", Or Even "teach My Performing Dogs New Tricks".

I Became My Own Only When I Gave Myself To Another.

But How Can The Characters In A Play Guess The Plot? We Are Not The Playwright, We Are Not The Producer, We Are Not Even The Audience. We Are On The Stage. To Play Well The Scenes In Which We Are "on" Concerns Us Much More Than To Guess About The Scenes That Follow It.

What Would Really Satisfy Us Would Be A God Who Said Of Anything We Happened To Like Doing, 'what Does It Matter So Long As They Are Contented?'

Don't Think Of God In Terms Of Forms, Because Forms Are Limited And God Is Unlimited.

The 'frankness' Of People Sunk Below Shame Is A Very Cheap Frankness.

We Meet No Ordinary People In Our Lives.

When I Was Ten, I Read Fairy Tales In Secret And Would Have Been Ashamed If I Had Been Found Doing So. Now That I Am Fifty, I Read Them Openly. When I Became A Man I Put Away Childish Things, Including The Fear Of Childishness And The Desire To Be Very Grown Up.

When All The Suns And Nebulae Have Passed Away, Each One Of You Will Still Be Alive.

Literary Experience Heals The Wound, Without Undermining The Privilege Of Individuality.. .here, As In Worship, In Love, In Moral Action, And In Knowing, I Transcend Myself; And Am Never More Myself Than When I Do.

Why You Fool, It's The Educated Reader Who Can Be Gulled. All Our Difficulty Comes With The Others. When Did You Meet A Workman Who Believes The Papers? He Takes It For Granted That They're All Propaganda And Skips The Leading Articles....he's Our Problem. We Have To Recondition Him. But The Educated Public, The People Who Read The High-brow Weeklies, Don't Need Reconditioning. They're All Right Already. They'll Believe Anything.

Well,' Said Ransom, 'if It Is A Delusion, It's A Pretty Stubborn One.

This Is One Of The Miracles Of Love: It Gives A Power Of Seeing Through Its Own Enchantments And Yet Not Being Disenchanted.

Puddleglum's My Name. But It Doesn't Matter If You Forget It. I Can Always Tell You Again.

Love, While Always Forgiving Of Imperfections And Mistakes, Can Never Cease To Will Their Removal.

Aim At Heaven And You Will Get Earth Thrown In. Aim At Earth And You Get Neither.

Christian Inspirational

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

We Have A Strange Illusion That Mere Time Cancels Sin. But Mere Time Does Nothing Either To The Fact Or To The Guilt Of A Sin.

We Are Born Helpless. As Soon As We Are Fully Conscious We Discover Loneliness. We Need Others Physically, Emotionally, And Intellectually. We Need Them If We Are To Know Anything, Even Ourselves.

The Task Of The Modern Educator Is Not To Cut Down Jungles, But To Irrigate Deserts.

Where, Except In The Present, Can The Eternal Be Met?

Precisely Because We Cannot Predict The Moment, We Must Be Ready At All Moments.

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.

Some Day You Will Be Old Enough To Start Reading Fairy Tales Again.

God Gives His Gifts Where He Finds The Vessel Empty Enough To Receive Them.

You Can't Really Study People; You Can Only Get To Know Them.

Human Culture Has Always Had To Exist Under The Shadow Of Something Infinitely More Important Than Itself. If Men Had Postponed The Search For Knowledge And Beauty Until They Were Secure, The Search Would Never Have Begun.

I Am Only Trying To Call Attention To A Fact; The Fact That This Year, Of This Month, Or, More Likely, This Very Day, We Have Failed To Practice Ourselves The Kind Of Behaviour We Expect From Other People.

You Can't Go Against The Grain Of The Universe And Not Expect To Get Splinters.

Where, Except In Uncreated Light, Can The Darkness Be Drowned?

If God Is Love, He Is, By Definition, Something More Than Mere Kindness.

I Wonder If People Who Asked For God To Intervene In Our World, Really Know What They Are Asking. Will They Want To Be There When God Really Does Intervene?

I Have Discovered, Passionate Grief Does Not Link Us With The Dead But Cuts Us Off From Them. This Becomes Clearer And Clearer. It Is Just At Those Moments When I Feel Least Sorrow - Getting Into My Morning Bath Is Usually One Of Them - That H. Rushes Upon My Mind In Her Full Reality, Her Otherness. Not, As In My Worst Moments, All Foreshortened And Patheticized And Solemnized By My Miseries, But As She Is In Her Own Right. This Is Good And Tonic.

Every Uncorrected Error And Unrepented Sin Is, In Its Own Right, A Fountain Of Fresh Error And Fresh Sin Flowing On To The End Of Time.

The Distinction Between Pretending You Are Better Than You Are And Beginning To Be Better In Reality Is Finer Than Moral Sleuth Hounds Conceive.

The Very Condition Of Having Friends Is That We Should Want Something Else Besides Friends. Where The Truthful Answer To The Question "do You See The Same Truth?" Would Be "i See Nothing And I Don't Care About The Truth; I Only Want A Friend," No Friendship Can Arise - Though Affection Of Course May. There Would Be Nothing For The Friendship To Be About; And Friendship Must Be About Something, Even If It Were Only An Enthusiasm For Dominoes Or White Mice. Those Who Have Nothing Can Share Nothing; Those Who Are Going Nowhere Can Have No Fellow-travellers.

It Is Only Our Bad Temper That We Put Down To Being Tired Or Worried Or Hungry; We Put Our Good Temper Down To Ourselves.

You Must Therefore Zealously Guard In His Mind The Curious Assumption 'my Time Is My Own'. Let Him Have The Feeling That He Starts Each Day As The Lawful Possessor Of Twenty-four Hours. Let Him Feel As A Grievous Tax That Portion Of This Property Which He Has To Make Over To Him Employers, And As A Generous Donation That Further Portion Which H Allows To Religious Duties. But What He Must Never Be Permitted To Doubt Is That The Total From Which These Deductions Have Been Made Was, In Some Mysterious Sense, His Own Personal Birthright.

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.

Next To The Blessed Sacrament Itself, Your Neighbor Is The Holiest Object Presented To Your Senses.

It Matters Enormously If I Alienate Anyone From The Truth.

Grief. The Pain Now Is Part Of The Happiness Then. That's The Deal.

Losing Everything

The Modern Idea Of A Great Man Is One Who Stands At The Lonely Extremity Of Some Single Line Of Development--

A Man With An Obsession Is A Man Who Has Very Little Sales Resistance.

But He Always Licked To Get Visitors Alone In The Billiard Room And Tell Them Stories About A Mysterious Lady, A Foreign Royalty, With Whom He Had Driven About London. 'a Devilish Temper She Had,' He Would Say. 'but She Was A Dem Fine Woman, Sir, A Dem Fine Woman.

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.

But In General, Take My Advice, When You Meet Anything That Is Going To Be Human And Isn’t Yet, Or Used To Be Human Once And Isn’t Now, Or Ought To Be Human And Isn’t, You Keep Your Eyes On It And Feel For Your Hatchet.

Forgive Us As We Forgive- We Are Offered Forgiveness On No Other Terms. To Refuse It Is To Refuse Gods Mercy For Ourselves.

For The Past Twenty Years You And I Have Been Fed All Day Long On Good Solid Lies About Sex

To Love At All Is To Be Vulnerable.

Jewel,' He Said, 'what Lies Before Us? Horrible Thoughts Arise In My Heart. If We Had Died Before Today We Should Have Been Happy.

Oh God, God, Why Did You Take Such Trouble To Force This Creature Out Of Its Shell If It Is Now Doomed To Crawl Back -- To Be Sucked Back -- Into It?

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

Christianity Does Not Involve The Belief That All Things Were Made For Man. It Does Involve The Belief That God Loves Man And For His Sake Became Man And Died.

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.

If Minds Are Wholly Dependent On Brains And Brains On Biochemistry, And Biochemistry (in The Long Run) On The Meaningless Flux Of The Atoms, I Cannot Understand How The Thought Of Those Minds Should Have Any More Significance Than The Sound Of The Wind In The Trees.

Before We Can Be Cured, We Must Want To Be Cured.

To Be A Christian Means To Forgive The Inexcusable Because God Has Forgiven The Inexcusable In You.

Giant Wimbleweather Burst Into One Of Those Not Very Intelligent Laughs To Which The Nicer Sort Of Giants Are So Liable. He Checked Himself At Once And Looked As Grace As A Turnip By The Time Reepicheep Discovered Where The Noise Came From.

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. But It Is Immortals Whom We Joke With, Work With, Marry, Snub And Exploit - Immortal Horrors Or Everlasting Splendors. This Does Not Mean That We Are To Be Perpetually Solemn. We Must Play. But Our Merriment Must Be Of That Kind (and It Is, In Fact, The Merriest Kind) Which Exists Between People Who Have, From The Outset, Taken Each Other Seriously - No Flippancy, No Superiority, No Presumption.

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

You And I Who Still Enjoy Fairy Tales Have Less Reason To Wish Actual Childhood Back. We Have Kept Its Pleasures And Added Some Grown-up Ones As Well.

The Ancient Man Approached God (or Even The Gods)as The Accused Person Approaches His Judge. For The Modern Man The Roles Are Reversed. He Is The Judge: God Is In The Dock. He Is Quite A Kindly Judge: If God Should Have A Reasonable Defense For Being The God Who Permits War, Poverty, And Disease, He Is Ready To Listen To It. The Trial May Even End In God's Acquittal. But The Important Thing Is That Man Is On The Bench And God Is In The Dock.

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

I Willingly Believe That The Damned Are, In One Sense, Successful, Rebels To The End; That The Doors Of Hell Are Locked On The Inside.

I Care Far More How Humanity Lives Than How Long. Progress, For Me, Means Increasing Goodness And Happiness Of Individual Lives. For The Species, As For Each Man, Mere Longevity Seems To Me A Contemptible Ideal.

The Question Is Not What We Intended Ourselves To Be, But What He Intended Us To Be When He Made Us.

He Liked Books If They Were Books Of Information And Had Pictures Of Grain Elevators Or Of Fat Foreign Children Doing Exercises In Model Schools.

Aslan's Instructions Always Work; There Are No Exceptions.

Nothing That You Have Not Given Away Will Ever Be Really Yours.

God Is No Fonder Of Intellectual Slackers Than He Is Of Any Other Slacker.

Literature Adds To Reality, It Does Not Simply Describe It. It Enriches The Necessary Competencies That Daily Life Requires And Provides; And In This Respect, It Irrigates The Deserts That Our Lives Have Already Become.

All Their Life In This World And All Their Adventures 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.

If Anyone Would Like To Acquire Humility, I Can, I Think, Tell Him The First Step. The First Step Is To Realize That One Is Proud. And A Biggish Step, Too. At Least, Nothing Whatever Can Be Done Before It. If You Think You Are Not Conceited, It Means That You Are Very Conceited Indeed.

A Moderated Religion Is As Good For Us As No Religion At All—and More Amusing.

Screwtape Letters

If You Don't Listen To Theology, That Won't Mean You Have No Ideas About God, It Will Mean You Have A Lot Of Wrong Ones.

If You Never Take Risks, You'll Never Accomplish Great Things. Everybody Dies, But Not Everyone Has Lived.

Everything Except God Has Some Natural Superior; Everything Except Unformed Matter Has Some Natural Inferior.

The Story Itself Should Force Its Moral Upon You. You Find Out What The Moral Is By Writing The Story.

When You And I Met, The Meeting Was Over Very Shortly, It Was Nothing. Now It Is Growing Something As We Remember It, What Will It Be When I Remember It As I Lie Down To Die, What It Makes In Me All My Days Till Then - That Is The Real Meeting. The Other Is Only The Beginning Of It. You Say You Have Poets In Your World. Do They Not Teach You This?

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? But If A Spiral, Am I Going Up Or Down It? How Often -- Will It Be For Always? -- How Often Will The Vast Emptiness Astonish Me Like A Complete Novelty And Make Me Say, "i Never Realized My Loss Till This Moment"? The Same Leg Is Cut Off Time After Time.

If They Won't Write The Kind Of Books We Like To Read We Shall Have To Write Them Ourselves.

Only A Bad Person Needs To Repent: Only A Good Person Can Repent Perfectly.

If You Do One Good Deed Your Reward Usually Is To Be Set To Do Another And Harder And Better One.

Isn't It Absolutely Essential To Keep A Fierce Left And Fierce Right, Both On Their Toes And Each Terrified Of The Other? That's How We Get Things Done.

No Time For Better Words, No Time To Unsay Anything. -til We Have Faces

Why Love If Losing Hurts So Much? We Love To Know That We Are Not Alone.

Humans Are Amphibians - Half Spirit And Half Animal. As Spirits They Belong To The Eternal World, But As Animals They Inhabit Time.

You Can't Go Back And Change The Beginning, But You Can Start Where You Are And Change The Ending.

The Value Of The Individual Does Not Lie In Him. He Receives It By Union With Christ.

The Cross Comes Before The Crown And Tomorrow Is A Monday Morning!

Obedience Is The Road To Freedom.

Well, You Know How It Feels If You Begin Hoping For Something That You Want Desperately Badly; You Almost Fight Against The Hope Because It Is Too Good To Be True; You've Been Disappointed So Often Before.

Hoping For Something

We Must Lay Before Him What Is In Us; Not What Ought To Be In Us.

It Is When We Notice The Dirt That God Is Most Present In Us; It Is The Very Sign Of His Presence.

But Courage, Child: We Are All Between The Paws Of The True Aslan.

God Cannot Give Us A Happiness And Peace Apart From Himself, Because It Is Not There. There Is No Such Thing.

Imagine A Set Of People All Living In The Same Building. Half Of Them Think It Is A Hotel, The Other Half Think It Is A Prison. Those Who Think It A Hotel Might Regard It As Quite Intolerable, And Those Who Thought It Was A Prison Might Decide That It Was Really Surprisingly Comfortable. So That What Seems The Ugly Doctrine Is One That Comforts And Strengthens You In The End. The People Who Try To Hold An Optimistic View Of This World Would Become Pessimists: The People Who Hold A Pretty Stern View Of It Become Optimistic.

Besides Being Complicated, Reality, In My Experience, Is Usually Odd. It Is Not Neat, Not Obvious, Not What You Expect.

Periods' Are Largely An Invention Of The Historians. The Poets Themselves Are Not Conscious Of Living In Any Period And Refuse To Conform To The Scheme.

If God Thinks This State Of War In The Universe Is A Price Worth Paying For Free Will--that Is, For Making A Live World In Which Creatures Can Do Real Good Or Harm And Something Of Real Importance Of Real Importance Can Happen, Instead Of A Toy World Which Only Moves When He Pulls The Strings--then We May Take It It Is Worth Paying.

For Jokes As Well As Justice Come In With Speech.

We Are Not The Playwright, We Are Not The Producer, We Are Not Even The Audience. We Are On The Stage.

Length Of Days With An Evil Heart Is Only Length Of Misery.

No One Ever Told Me That Grief Felt So Like Fear.

And There We All Were, As Invisible As You Could Wish To See.

The Value Of Myth Is That It Takes All The Things You Know And Restores To Them The Rich Significance Which Has Been Hidden By The Veil Of Familiarity.

When The Author Walks Onto The Stage, The Play Is Over

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

As Long As You Are Proud, You Cannot Know God.

A Christian Society Is Not Going To Arrive Until Most Of Us Really Want It: And We Are Not Going To Want It Until We Become Fully Christian. I May Repeat "do As You Would Be Done By" Till I Am Black In The Fact, But I Cannot Really Carry It Out Till I Love My Neighbour As Myself: And I Cannot Learn To Love My Neighbour As Myself Till I Learn To Love God.

Notice How We Are Perpetually Surprised At Time. ('how Time Flies! Fancy John Being Grown-up And Married! I Can Hardly Believe It!') In Heavens Name, Why? Unless, Indeed, There Is Something In Us Which Is Not Temporal.

We Shall Not Be Well So Long As We Love And Admire Anything More Than We Love And Admire God.

Of Course All Children's Literature Is Not Fantastic, So All Fantastic Books Need Not Be Children's Books. It Is Still Possible, Even In An Age So Ferociously Anti-romantic As Our Own, To Write Fantastic Stories For Adults: Though You Will Usually Need To Have Made A Name In Some More Fashionable Kind Of Literature Before Anyone Will Publish Them.

[to Have Faith In Christ] Means, Of Course, Trying To Do All That He Says. There Would Be No Sense In Saying You Trusted A Person If You Would Not Take His Advice. Thus If You Have Really Handed Yourself Over To Him, It Must Follow That You Are Trying To Obey Him. But Trying In A New Way, A Less Worried Way. Not Doing These Things In Order To Be Saved, But Because He Has Begun To Save You Already. Not Hoping To Get To Heaven As A Reward For Your Actions, But Inevitably Wanting To Act In A Certain Way Because A First Faint Gleam Of Heaven Is Already Inside You.

A Thing May Be Morally Neutral And Yet The Desire For That Thing May Be Dangerous.

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

We Do Not Want To Merely “see” Beauty. We Want To Be United With It, To Receive It Into Ourselves, To Become Part Of It.

The Problem Of Reconciling Human Suffering With The Existence Of A God Who Loves, Is Only Insoluble So Long As We Attach A Trivial Meaning To The Word "love", And Look On Things As If Man Were The Centre Of Them. Man Is Not The Centre. God Does Not Exist For The Sake Of Man. Man Does Not Exist For His Own Sake. "thou Hast Created All Things, And For Thy Pleasure They Are And Were Created." We Were Made Not Primarily That We May Love God (though We Were Made For That Too) But That God May Love Us, That We May Become Objects In Which The Divine Love May Rest "well Pleased".

Death And Resurrection Are What The Story Is About And Had We But Eyes To See It, This Has Been Hinted On Every Page, Met Us, In Some Disguise, At Every Turn, And Even Been Muttered In Conversations Between Such Minor Characters (if They Are Minor Characters) As The Vegetables.

Besides Reasoning About Matters Of Fact, Men Also Make Moral Judgements.

The Choice Of Every Lost Soul Can Be Expressed In The Words "better To Reign In Hell Than Serve In Heaven." There Is Always Something They Insist On Keeping, Even At The Price Of Misery.

Growing Maturity Is Marked By The Increasing Liberties We Take With Our Travelling... We Made The Discovery (some People Never Make It) That Real Books Can Be Taken On A Journey And That Hours Of Golden Reading Can So Be Added To Its Other Delights.

The Real Oxford Is A Close Corporation Of Jolly, Untidy, Lazy, Good-for-nothing Humorous Old Men, Who Have Been Electing Their Own Successors Ever Since The World Began And Who Intend To Go On With It. They'll Squeeze Under The Revolution Or Leap Over It When The Time Comes, Don't You Worry.

"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..."

You Thought You Were Being Made Into A Decent Little Cottage But He Is Building A Palace. He Intends To Come & Live In It Himself

Christianity, If False, Is Of No Importance, And If True, Of Infinite Importance. The Only Thing It Cannot Be Is Moderately Important.

Friendship Is Unnecessary, Like Philosophy, Like Art... It Has No Survival Value; Rather It Is One Of Those Things That Give Value To Survival.

Am I To Understand,' Said Reepicheep To Lucy After A Long Stare At Eustace, 'that This Singularly Discourteous Person Is Under Your Majesty's Protection? Because, If Not--

Evil Can Be Undone, But It Cannot 'develop' Into Good. Time Does Not Heal It. The Spell Must Be Unwound, Bit By Bit, 'with Backward Mutters Of Dissevering Power' - Or Else Not.

Unless I Believe In God, I Cannot Believe In Thought: So I Can Never Use Thought To Disbelieve In God.

Dance And Game Are Frivolous, Unimportant Down Here; For "down Here" Is Not Their Natural Place. Here, They Are A Moment's Rest From The Life We Were Placed Here To Live. But In This World Everything Is Upside Down. That Which, If It Could Be Prolonged Here, Would Be A Truancy, Is Likest That Which In A Better Country Is The End Of Ends. Joy Is The Serious Business Of Heaven.

If We Did Not Bring To The Examinations Of Our Instincts A Knowledge Of Their Comparative Dignity We Could Never Learn It From Them.

If We Are Any Good We Must Always Be Working Towards The Moment At Which Our Pupils Are Fit To Become Our Critics & Rivals

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.

To Make Christianity A Private Affair While Banishing All Privacy Is To Relegate It To The Rainbow's End Or The Greek Calends.

The Old Field Of Space, Time, Matter, And The Senses Is To Be Weeded, Dug, And Sown For A New Crop. We May Be Tired Of That Old Field: God Is Not.

Those Who Put Themselves In His Hands Will Become Perfect, As He Is Perfect- Perfect In Love, Wisdom, Joy, Beauty, Health, And Immortality. The Change Will Not Be Completed In This Life, For Death Is An Important Part Of The Treatment. How Far The Change Will Have Gone Before Death In Any Particular Christian Is Uncertain.

If We Let Ourselves, We Shall Always Be Waiting For Some Distraction Or Other To End Before We Can Really Get Down To Our Work. The Only People Who Achieve Much Are Those Who Want Knowledge So Badly That They Seek It While The Conditions Are Still Unfavorable. Favorable Conditions Never Come.

If I Had Really Cared As I Thought I Did About The Sorrows Of The World I Should Not Have Been So Overwhelmed When My Own Sorrow Came- I Thought I Trusted The Rope Until It Mattered To Me Whether It Would Bear Me, Now It Matters And I Find I Didn't.

Children Have One Kind Of Silliness, As You Know, And Grown-ups Have Another Kind.

To Be Religious Is To Have One's Attention Fixed On God And On One's Neighbour In Relation To God.

God's Love Is Not Wearied By Our Sins & Is Relentless In Its Determination That We Be Cured At Whatever Cost To Us Or Him

A Man Can't Be Taken To Hell, Or Sent To Hell: You Can Only Get There On Your Own Steam.

That Will Not Be The Time For Choosing: It Will Be The Time When We Discover Which Side We Really Have Chosen, Whether We Realized It Before Or Not. Now, Today, This Moment, Is Out Chance To Chose The Right Side. God Is Holding Back To Give Us That Chance. It Will Not Last Forever. We Must Take It Or Leave It.

If Human Life Is In Fact Ordered By A Beneficent Being Whose Knowledge Of Our Real Needs And Of The Way In Which They Can Be Satisfied Infinitely Exceeds Our Own, We Must Expect A Priori That His Operations Will Often Appear To Us Far From Beneficent And Far From Wise, And That It Will Be Our Highest Prudence To Give Him Our Confidence In Spite Of This.

I Enjoyed My Breakfast This Morning, And I Think That Was A Good Thing And Do Not Think It Was Condemned By God. But I Do Not Think Myself A Good Man For Enjoying It.

Never, Never Pin Your Whole Faith On Any Human Being: Not If He Is The Best And Wisest In The Whole World. There Are Lots Of Nice Things You Can Do With Sand; But Do Not Try Building A House On It.

Who Can Duly Adore That Love Which Will Open The High Gates To A Prodigal Who Is Brought In Kicking, Struggling, Resentful, And Darting His Eyes In Every Direction For A Chance Of Escape? The Words Compelle Intrare, Compel Them To Come In, Have Been So Abused By Wicked Men That We Shudder At Them; But, Properly Understood, They Plumb The Depth Of The Divine Mercy. The Hardness Of God Is Kinder Than The Softness Of Man, And His Compulsion Is Our Liberation.

Humans Are Very Seldom Either Totally Sincere Or Totally Hypocritical. Their Moods Change, Their Motives Are Mixed, And They Are Often Quite Mistaken As To What Their Motives Are.

He Thinks Great Folly, Child,' Said Aslan. "this World Is Bursting With Life For These Few Days Because The Song With Which I Called It Into Life Still Hangs In The Air And Rumbles In The Ground. It Will Not Be So For Long. But I Cannot Tell That To This Old Sinner, And I Cannot Comfort Him Either; He Has Made Himself Unable To Hear My Voice. If I Spoke To Him, He Would Hear Only Growlings And Roarings. Oh, Adam's Son, How Cleverly You Defend Yourself Against All That Might Do You Good!

It Is That Of An Unsatisfied Desire Which Is Itself More Desirable Than Any Other Satisfaction.

The Only Palliative Is To Keep The Clean Sea Breeze Of The Centuries Blowing Through Our Minds, And This Can Be Done Only By Reading Old Books.

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.

All Day I Have Been Tossed And Whirled In A Preposterous Happiness; Was It An Elf In The Blood? Or A Bird In The Brain? Or Even Part Of The Cloudily Crested, Fifty-league-long, Loud, Uplifted Wave Of A Journeying Angels Transit Over And Through My Heart?

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

Falling In Love

Which Of The Religions Of The World Gives To Its Followers The Greatest Happiness? While It Lasts, The Religion Of Worshiping Oneself Is Best.

When We Are Wholly His We Will Be More Ourselves Than Ever.

Novelty May Fix Our Attention Not Even On The Service But On The Celebrant. You Know What I Mean. Try As One May To Exclude It, The Question "what On Earth Is He Up To Now?" Will Intrude. It Lays One's Devotion Waste. There Is Really Some Excuse For The Man Who Said, "i Wish They'd Remember That The Charge To Peter Was Feed My Sheep; Not Try Experiments On My Rats, Or Even, Teach My Performing Dogs New Tricks.

Things Always Work According To Their Nature.

Look For Christ And You Will Find Him, And With Him Everything Else Thrown In

All Schools Both Here And In America Should Teach Far Fewer Subjects Far Better.

Prayer In The Sense Of Petition, Asking For Things, Is A Small Part Of It; Confession And Penitence Are Its Threshold, Adoration Its Sanctuary, The Presence And Vision And Enjoyment Of God Its Bread And Wine.

The Typical Expression Of Opening Friendship Would Be Something Like, 'what? You Too? I Thought I Was The Only One!

I Have At Last Come To The End Of The Faerie Queene: And Though I Say "at Last", I Almost Wish He Had Lived To Write Six Books More As He Had Hoped To Do — So Much Have I Enjoyed It.

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.

Every Time You Make A Choice You Are Turning The Central Part Of You, The Part Of You That Chooses, Into Something A Little Different From What It Was Before. And Taking Your Life As A Whole, With All Your Innumerable Choices, All Your Life Long You Are Slowly Turning This Central Thing Either Into A Heavenly Creature Or Into A Hellish Creature...

All Mortals Tend To Turn Into The Thing They Are Pretending To Be. This Is Elementary

Screwtape Letters

We Are...a Divine Work Of Art, Something That God Is Making...something With Which He Will Not Be Satisfied Until It Has A Certain Character.

You Can’t Get Second Things By Putting Them First. You Get Second Things Only By Putting First Things First.

Put First Things First

First Things First

No Good Poem, However Confessional It May Be, Is Just A Self-expression. Who On Earth Would Claim That The Pearl Expresses The Oyster?

Joy Bursts In Our Lives When We Go About Doing The Good At Hand And Not Trying To Manipulate Things And Times To Achieve Joy.

Nothing In Man Is Either Worse Or Better For Being Shared With The Beasts.

Nothing Less Will Shake A Man — Or At Any Rate A Man Like Me — Out Of His Merely Verbal Thinking And His Merely Notional Beliefs. He Has To Be Knocked Silly Before He Comes To His Senses. Only Torture Will Bring Out The Truth. Only Under Torture Does He Discover It Himself.

Prostitutes Are In No Danger Of Finding Their Present Life So Satisfactory That They Cannot Turn To God: The Proud, The Avaricious, The Self-righteous, Are In That Danger.

Each New Power Won By Man Is A Power Over Man As Well. Each Advance Leaves Him Weaker As Well As Stronger.

Thought Provoking

God Knows Our Situation; He Will Not Judge Us As If We Had No Difficulties To Overcome. What Matters Is The Sincerity And Perseverance Of Our Will To Overcome Them.

Beauty Is Not Democratic; She Reveals Herself More To The Few Than To The Many.

If We Will Not Learn To Eat The Only Food That The Universe Grows...then We Must Starve Eternally.

No Man Who Says, 'i'm As Good As You,' Believes It. He Would Not Say It If He Did.

Though No One Would Want To Be Sold As A Slave, It Is Perhaps Even More Galling To Be A Sort Of Utility Slave Whom No One Will Buy.

When We Force A Boy To Be A Mediocrity In A Dozen Subjects We Destroy His Standards, Perhaps For Life.

The Moment You Wake Up Each Morning, All Your Wishes And Hopes For The Day Rush At You Like Wild Animals. And The First Job Each Morning Consists In Shoving It All Back; In Listening To That Other Voice, Taking That Other Point Of View, Letting That Other, Larger, Stronger, Quieter Life Come Flowing In.

I Expect You Have Seen Someone Put A A Lighted Match To A Bit Of Newspaper Which Is Propped Up In A Grate Against An Unlit Fire. And For A Second Nothing Seems To Have Happened; And Then You Notice A Tiny Steak Of Flame Creeping Along The Edged Of The Newspaper. It Was Like That Now.

History Is A Story Written By The Finger Of God.

I Sometimes Think That Shame, Mere Awkward, Senseless Shame, Does As Much Towards Preventing Good Acts And Straightforward Happiness As Any Of Our Vices Can Do.

Do You Not Know How Bashful Friendship Is? Friends - Comrades - Do Not Look At Each Other. Friendship Would Be Ashamed.

There Is One Vice Of Which No Man In The World Is Free; Which Every One In The World Loathes When He Sees It In Someone Else; And Of Which Hardly Any People, Except Christians, Ever Imagine That They Are Guilty Themselves. […] There Is No Fault Which Makes A Man More Unpopular, And No Fault Which We Are More Unconscious Of In Ourselves.[…]the Vice I Am Talking Of Is Pride Or Self-conceit: And The Virtue Opposite To It, In Christian Morals, Is Called Humility.

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.

It Is In The Process Of Being Worshipped That God Communicates His Presence To Men.

You Must Not Do, You Must Not Even Try To Do, The Will Of The Father Unless You Are Prepared To 'know Of The Doctrine'.

In My Experience, It Is Affection That Creates This Taste, Teaching Us First To Notice, Then To Endure, Then To Smile At, Then To Enjoy, And Finally To Appreciate The People Who 'happen To Be There.' Made For Us? Thank God, No. They Are Themselves, Odder Than You Could Have Believed And Worth Far More Than We Guessed.

The Hard Sayings Of Our Lord Are Wholesome To Those Only Who Find Them Hard.

We Know Nothing Of Religion Here: We Only Think Of Christ.

Each Generation Exercises Power Over Its Successors: And Each, In So Far As It Modifies The Environment Bequeathed To It And Rebels Against Tradition, Resists And Limits The Power Of Its Predecessors.

Thought Provoking

[something] Does Not Rise To The Dignity Of Error.

It Means That Though The Witch Knew The Deep Magic, There Is A Magic Deeper Still That She Did Not Know. Her Knowledge Goes Back Only To The Dawn Of Time. But If She Could Have Looked A Little Further Back, Into The Stillness And Darkness Before Time Began, She Would Have Read There A Different Incantation. She Would Have Known That When A Willing Victim Who Had Committed No Treachery Was Killed In A Traitor's Stead, The Table Would Crack And Death Itself Would Work Backwards.

It Is In Their 'good' Characters That Novelists Make, Unawares, The Most Shocking Self- Revelations.

Readers Are Advised To Remember That The Devil Is A Liar.

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Alberto Manguel

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