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I Am Perfectly Convinced That Whatever The Gospels Are They Are Not Legends. I Have Read A Great Deal Of Legend And I Am Quite Clear They Are Not That Sort Of Thing....christ Bent Down And Scribbled In The Dust With His Finger. Nothing Comes Of This. No One Has Based Any Doctrine On It. And The Act Of Inventing Little Irrelevant Details To Make An Imaginary Scene More Convincing Is Purely A Modern Art.

-C. S. Lewis

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I Am Perfectly Convinced

C. S. Lewis

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I Am Perfectly Convinced That Whatever The Gospels Are They Are Not Legends. I Have Read A Great Deal Of Legend And I Am Quite Clear They Are Not That Sort Of Thing....christ Bent Down And Scribbled In The Dust With His Finger. Nothing Comes Of This. No One Has Based Any Doctrine On It. And The Act Of Inventing Little Irrelevant Details To Make An Imaginary Scene More Convincing Is Purely A Modern Art.

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

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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.

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

I Am Sure That God Keeps No One Waiting Unless He Sees That It Is Good For Him To Wait.

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.

The Most Deeply Compelled Action Is Also The Freest Action. By That I Mean, No Part Of You Is Outside The Action.

No One Can Teach Riding So Well As A Horse.

Practice Makes Perfect

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

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.

The Naturalists Have Been Engaged In Thinking About Nature. They Have Not Attended To The Fact That They Were Thinking. The Moment One Attends To This It Is Obvious That One's Own Thinking Cannot Be Merely A Natural Event, And That Therefore Something Other Than Nature Exists. The Supernatural Is Not Remote Or Abstruse; It Is A Matter Of Daily And Hourly Experience, As Intimate As Breathing.

I Do Not Doubt That If The Paradisal Man Could Now Appear Among Us, We Should Regard Him As An Utter Savage, A Creature To Be Exploited Or, At Best, Patronised. Only One Or Two, And Those The Holiest Among Us, Would Glance A Second Time At The Naked, Shaggy-bearded, Slow Spoken Creature: But They, After A Few Minutes, Would Fall At His Feet.

A Man Who Was Merely A Man And Said The Sort Of Things Jesus Said Wouldn't Be A Great Moral Teacher. He'd Be Either A Lunatic On A Level With A Man Who Says He's A Poached Egg Or Else He'd 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.

In Commanding Us To Glorify Him, God Is Inviting Us To Enjoy Him.

What Flows Into You From Myth Is Not Truth But Reality (truth Is Always About Something, But Reality Is That About Which Truth Is), And Therefore, Every Myth Becomes The Father Of Innumerable Truths On The Abstract Level.

He That But Looketh On A Plate Of Ham And Eggs To Lust After It Hath Already Committed Breakfast With It In His Heart

My Idea Of God Is Not A Divine Idea. It Has To Be Shattered Time After Time. He Shatters It Himself.

The Real Problem Is Not Why Some Pious, Humble, Believing People Suffer, But Why Some Do Not.

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

The Proper Motto Is Not Be Good, Sweet Maid, And Let Who Can Be Clever, But Be Good Sweet Maid, And Don't Forget That This Involves Being As Clever As You Can. God Is No Fonder Of Intellectual Slackers Than Any Other Slackers.

Actually It Seems To Me That One Can Hardly Say Anything Either Bad Enough Or Good Enough About Life.

Even The Best Christian That Ever Lived Is Not Acting On His Own Steam--he Is Only Nourishing Or Protecting A Life He Could Never Have Acquired By His Own Efforts.

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

You Can't Lay Down Any Pattern For God. There Are Many Different Ways Of Bringing People Into His Kingdom, Even Some Ways That I Specially Dislike! I Have Therefore Learned To Be Cautious In My Judgment.

At All Ages, If [fantasy And Myth] Is Used Well By The Author And Meets The Right Reader, It Has The Same Power: To Generalize While Remaining Concrete, To Present In Palpable Form Not Concepts Or Even Experiences But Whole Classes Of Experience, And To Throw Off Irrelevancies. Bat At Its Best It Can Do More; It Can Give Us Experiences We Have Never Had And Thus, Instead Of 'commenting On Life,' Can Add To It.

The Prayer Preceding All Prayers Is 'may It Be The Real I Who Speaks. May It Be The Real Thou That I Speak To.'

Every Day In A Life Fills The Whole Life With Expectations And Memory.

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

The Man Can Neither Man, Nor Retain, One Moment Of Time; It All Comes To Him By Pure Gift; He Might As Well Regard The Sun And Moon As His Chattels.

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.

Only The Skilled Can Judge The Skillfulness, But That Is Not The Same As Judging The Value Of The Result.

Provocation Doesn't Make Me Ill-tempered: It Only Shows Me How Ill-tempered I Am.

Surely You Know That If A Man Can't Be Cured Of Churchgoing, The Next Best Thing Is To Send Him All Over The Neighbourhood Looking For The Church That "suits" Him Until He Becomes A Taster Or Connoisseur Of Churches.

Courtship Is The Time For Sowing Those Seeds Which Will Grow Up Ten Years Into Domestic Hatred.

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.

Eating And Reading Are Two Pleasures That Combine Admirably.

Christianity Is A Fighting Religion.

The Opposite Of Love Is Not Hate, But Power

It Has Actually Become Very Necessary In Our Time To Rebut The Theory That Every Firm And Serious Friendship Is Really Homosexual.

In Our Adversity, God Shouts To Us.

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

It Is Not Your Business To Succeed, But To Do Right. When You Have Done So The Rest Lies With God.

The Best Fruits Are Plucked For Each By Some Hand That Is Not His Own.

There Is But One Good; That Is God. Everything Else Is Good When It Looks To Him And Bad When It Turns From Him.

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

One Is Sometimes Glad Not To Be A Great Theologian; One Might Easily Mistake It For Being A Good Christian.

The Christian Claim Is: Nothing Explains The Facts Better Than An All-powerful, All-knowing, Omnipresent God Creating The Universe And Sending Jesus To Spread His Message. This Is About As Remarkable A Claim As Could Be Stated, And Yet It Is Tossed Out Lightly. Christians Seem To Imagine That "god Did It" Is As Plausible As The Natural Explanation That Stories Grow With The Retelling. The Christian Has The Burden Of Proof, And It's An Enormous Burden Given This Enormous Claim.

A Christian Is Not A Man Who Never Goes Wrong, But A Man Who Is Enabled To Repent.

Above All, Do Not Attempt To Use Science (i Mean, The Real Sciences) As A Defence Against Christianity. They Will Positively Encourage Him To Think About Realities He Can’t Touch And See.

There Are Only Two Kinds Of People In The End: Those Who Say To God, "thy Will Be Done," And Those To Whom God Says, In The End, "thy Will Be Done." All That Are In Hell, Choose It. Without That Self-choice There Could Be No Hell. No Soul That Seriously And Constantly Desires Joy Will Ever Miss It. Those Who Seek Find. Those Who Knock It Is Opened.

Sanity ... Had It Ever Been More Than A Convention -- A Comfortable Set Of Blinkers, An Agreed Mode Of Wishful Thinking, Which Excluded From Our View The Full Strangeness And Malevolence Of The Universe We Are Compelled To Inhabit?

We Cannot Fully Understand The Relations Of Time And Choice Until We Are Beyond Both.

We Forgive, We Mortify Our Resentment; A Week Later Some Chain Of Thought Carries Us Back To The Original Offence And We Discover The Old Resentment Blazing Away As If Nothing Had Been Done About It At All. We Need To Forgive Our Brother Seventy Times Seven Not Only For 490 Offences But For One Offence.

Perfect Goodness Can Never Debate About The End To Be Attained, And Perfect Wisdom Cannot Debate About The Means Most Suited To Achieve It.

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

And This Is The Marvel Of Marvels; That He Called Me Beloved.

In Our World," Said Eustace, "a Star Is A Huge Ball Of Flaming Gas." Even In Your World, My Son, That Is Not What A Star Is, But Only What It Is Made Of.

As Long As You Notice, And Have To Count The Steps, You Are Not Yet Dancing But Only Learning To Dance. A Good Shoe Is A Shoe You Don't Notice. Good Reading Becomes Possible When You Need Not Conciously Think About Eyes, Or Light, Or Print, Or Spelling. The Perfect Church Service Would Be The One We Were Almost Unaware Of; Our Attention Would Have Been On God.

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.

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

Pain Is God's Megaphone To Rouse A Deaf World.

As Image And Apprehension Are In Organic Unity, So, For A Christian, Are Human Body And Human Soul.

We Are Not Living In A World Where All Roads Are Radii If 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.

When Golden Moments Come, When God Enables One Really To Pray Without Words, Who But A Fool Would Reject The Gift?

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

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.

The Worst Attitude Of All Would Be The Professional Attitude Which Regards Children In The Lump As A Sort Of Raw Material Which We Have To Handle.

The Christians Who Did Most For The Present World Were Precisely Those Who Thought Most Of The Next.

We Are Not Merely Imperfect Creatures Who Must Be Improved; We Are Rebels Who Must Lay Down Our Arms.

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.

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.

If You Make The Same Guess Often Enough It Ceases To Be A Guess And Becomes A Scientific Fact. This Is The Inductive Method.

How Little People Know Who Think That Holiness Is Dull... When One Meets The Real Thing, It's Irresistible!

[repentance] Means Unlearning All The Self-conceit And Self -will That We Have Been Training Ourselves Into... It Means Killing Part Of Yourself, Under-going A Kind Of Death.

As For Wrinkles--pshaw! Why Shouldn't We Have Wrinkles? Honorable Insignia Of Long Service In This Warfare.

I Felt In My Bones That This Universe Does Not Explain Itself.

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

If Each Side Had Been Frankly Contending For Its Own Real Wish, They Would All Have Kept Within The Bounds Of Reason And Courtesy; But Just Because The Contention Is Reversed And Each Side Is Fighting The Other Side’s Battle, All The Bitterness Which Really Flows From Thwarted Self-righteousness And Obstinacy And From The Accumulated Grudges Of The Last Ten Years Is Concealed From Them By The Nominal Or Official "unselfishness" Of What They Are Doing Or, At Least, Held To Be Excused By It.

The Only Thing Christianity Can Not Be...is Moderately Important.

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

We Come To Scripture Not To Learn A Subject But To Steep Ourselves In A Person.

Telling Us To Obey Instinct Is Like Telling Us To Obey 'people.' People Say Different Things: So Do Instincts. Our Instincts Are At War... Each Instinct, If You Listen To It, Will Claim To Be Gratified At The Expense Of The Rest.

Poetry Most Often Communicates Emotions, Not Directly, But By Creating Imaginatively The Grounds For Those Emotions. It Therefore Communicates Something More Than The Emotion; Only By Means Of That Something More Does It Communicate The Emotion At All.

Prosperity Knits A Man To The World.

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To Live In A Fully Predictable World Is Not To Be A Man.

Do Not By Any Means Destroy Yourself, For If You Live You May Yet Have Good Fortune, But All The Dead Are Dead Like.

Look For Yourself, And You Will Find In The Long Run Only Hatred, Loneliness, Despair, Rage, Ruin, And Decay. But Look For Christ And You Will Find Him, And With Him Everything Else Thrown In.

Isn't It Funny How Day By Day Nothing Changes, But When You Look Back, Everything Is Different.

Really, A Young Atheist Cannot Guard His Faith Too Carefully. Dangers Lie In Wait For Him On Every Side. 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." All My Acts, Desires, And Thoughts Were To Be Brought Into Harmony With Universal Spirit. For The First Time I Examined Myself With A Seriously Practical Purpose. And There I Found What Appalled Me; A Zoo Of Lusts, A Bedlam Of Ambitions, A Nursery Of Fears, A Harem Of Fondled Hatreds. My Name Was Legion.

Never Exaggerate. Never Say More Than You Really Mean.

In Your World, I Have Another Name. You Should Know Me By It.

The Very First Tear He Made Was So Deep That I Thought It Had Gone Right Into My Heart.

Peter Did Not Feel Very Brave; Indeed, He Felt He Was Going To Be Sick. But That Made No Difference To What He Had To Do.

Anyone Who Endeavors To Be A Christian Will Soon Find His Intelligence Being Sharpened. You Are Embarking On Something That Is Going To Take The Whole Of You, Brains And All.

Gratitude Exclaims, Very Properly, 'how Good Of God To Give Me This.'

The Sane Would Do No Good If They Made Themselves Mad To Help Madmen.

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.

Do Not Let Us Mistake Necessary Evils For Good.

Nothing Is Wonderful Except In The Abnormal, And Nothing Is Abnormal Until We Have Grasped The Norm.

Believing Things On Authority Only Means Believing Them Because You Have Been Told Them By Someone You Think Trustworthy. Ninety-nine Per Cent Of The Things You Believe Are Believed On Authority... Every Historical Event In The World Is Believed On Authority. None Of Us Has Seen The Norman Conquest Or The Defeat Of The Armada.

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.

Where Men Are Forbidden To Honour A King, They Honor Millionaires, Athletes, Or Film Stars Instead; Even Famous Prostitutes Or Gangsters. For Spiritual Nature, Like Bodily Nature, Will Be Served; Deny It Food And It Will Gobble Poison.

Is There Any Possibility Of Getting The Super Welfare State's Honey And Avoiding The Sting?

Art Can Teach Without At All Ceasing To Be Art.

Children Are Not Deceived By Fairy-tales; They Are Often And Gravely Deceived By School-stories. Adults Are Not Deceived By Science-fiction ; They Can Be Deceived By The Stories In The Women's Magazines.

You Can Put This Another Way By Saying That While In Other Sciences The Instruments You Use Are Things External To Yourself (things Like Microscopes And Telescopes), The Instrument Through Which You See God Is Your Whole Self. And If A Man's Self Is Not Kept Clean And Bright, His Glimpse Of God Will Be Blurred - Like The Moon Seen Through A Dirty Telescope. That Is Why Horrible Nations Have Horrible Religions: They Have Been Looking At God Through A Dirty Lens.

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.

Relying On God Has To Begin All Over Again Every Day As If Nothing Had Yet Been Done.

We Thought The Duke Would Have Been Pleased If The King's Majesty Would Have Married His Daughter, But Nothing Came Of That--' Squints, And Has Freckles,' Said Caspian. Oh, Poor Girl,' Said Lucy.

We Must Get Over Wanting To Be Needed.

God Whispers To Us In Our Pleasures, Speaks To Us In Our Conscience, But Shouts In Our Pains.

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.

Have Fun, Even If It’s Not The Same Kind Of Fun Everyone Else Is Having.

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

Fancy Sleeping On Air. I Wonder If Anyone's Done It Before. I Don't Suppose They Have. Oh, Bother—-scrubb Probably Has!

Put First Things First And We Get Second Things Thrown In: Put Second Things First & We Lose Both First And Second Things.

Put First Things First

Those Who Do Not Think About Their Own Sins Make Up For It By Thinking Incessantly About The Sins Of Others.

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?

[god] Will Not Be Used As A Convenience. Men Or Nations Who Think They Can Revive The Faith In Order To Make A Good Society Might Just As Well Think They Can Use The Stairs Of Heaven As A Shortcut To The Nearest Chemist's Shop.

A Centaur Has A Man-stomach And A Horse-stomach. And Of Course Both Want Breakfast. So First Of All He Has Porridge And Pavenders And Kidneys And Bacon And Omlette And Cold Ham And Toast And Marmalade And Coffee And Beer. And After That He Tends To The Horse Part Of Himself By Grazing For An Hour Or So And Finishing Up With A Hot Mash, Some Oats, And A Bag Of Sugar. That's Why It's Such A Serious Thing To Ask A Centaur To Stay For The Weeekend. A Very Serious Thing Indeed.

The Great Thing With Unhappy Times Is To Take Them Bit By Bit, Hour By Hour, Like An Illness. It Is Seldom The Present, The Exact Present, That Is Unbearable.

Aslan Is A Lion- The Lion, The Great Lion." "ooh" Said Susan. "i'd Thought He Was A Man. Is He-quite Safe? I Shall Feel Rather Nervous About Meeting A Lion"..."safe?" Said Mr Beaver ..."who Said Anything About Safe? 'course He Isn't Safe. But He's Good. He's The King, I Tell You.

Once The Feet Are Put Right, All The Rest Of Him Will Follow.

To Admire Satan [in Paradise Lost] Is To Give One's Vote Not Only For A World Of Misery, But Also For A World Of Lies And Propaganda, Of Wishful Thinking, Of Incessant Autobiography.

Most Of Us Are Not Really Approaching The Subject In Order To Find Out What Christianity Says; We Are Approaching It In The Hope Of Finding Support From Christianity For The Views Of Our Own Party.

All Names Will Soon Be Restored To Their Proper Owners.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

We Must Perpetually Try To Distinguish, However Closely They Get Entwined By The Subtle Nature Of The Facts And By The Secret Importunity Of Our Passions, Those Attitudes In A Writer Which We Can Honestly And Confidently Condemn As Real Evils, And Those Qualities In His Writing Which Simply Annoy And Offend Us As Men Of Taste.

Holiness Is Irresistible. If Even 10% Of The World's Population Had It The Whole World Would Be Converted And Happy Before The Year's End.

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

To Love At All Is To Be Vulnerable. 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. Wrap It Carefully Round With Hobbies And Little Luxuries; Avoid All Entanglements. Lock It Up Safe In The Casket Or Coffin Of Your Selfishness. But In That Casket, Safe, Dark, Motionless, Airless, It Will Change. It Will Not Be Broken; It Will Become Unbreakable, Impenetrable, Irredeemable. To Love Is To Be Vulnerable.

I Hope No One Who Reads This Book Has Been Quite As Miserable As Susan And Lucy Were That Night; But If You Have Been - If You've Been Up All Night And Cried Till You Have No More Tears Left In You - You Will Know That There Comes In The End A Sort Of Quietness. You Feel As If Nothing Is Ever Going To Happen Again.

I Have Seen Great Beauty Of Spirit In Some Who Were Great Sufferers. I Have Seen Men, For The Most Part, Grow Better Not Worse With Advancing Years, And I Have Seen The Last Illness Produce Treasures Of Fortitude And Meekness From Most Unpromising Subjects.

One Can Regard The Moral Law As An Illusion, And So Cut Himself Off From The Common Ground Of Humanity.

If You Look For Truth, You May Find Comfort In The End; If You Look For Comfort You Will Not Get Either Comfort Or Truth Only Soft Soap And Wishful Thinking To Begin, And In The End, Despair.

Always Winter But Never Christmas.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

Unless Thought Is Valid We Have No Reason To Believe In The Real Universe.

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

The Truth Is, Of Course, That What One Regards As Interruptions Are Precisely One's Life.

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

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

If Ever They Remembered Their Life In This World It Was As One Remembers A Dream.

Whenever A Person Dwells Chiefly, Or Even Frequently, On The Faults Of Other People's Religions, He Is In A Bad Condition.

If Tribulation Is A Necessary Element In Redemption, We Must Anticipate That It Will Never Cease Till God Sees The World To Be Either Redeemed Or No Further Redeemable.

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

We Have Had Enough, Once And For All, Of Hedonism--the Gloomy Philosophy Which Says That Pleasure Is The Only Good.

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".

Obedience Is The Key That Opens Every Door.

Mercy Detached From Justice Grows Unmerciful.

Once A King In Narnia, Always A King In Narnia. But Don't Go Trying To Use The Same Route Twice. Indeed, Don't Try To Get There At All. It'll Happen When You're Not Looking For It. And Don't Talk Too Much About It Even Among Yourselves. And Don't Mention It To Anyone Else Unless You Find That They've Had Adventures Of The Same Sort Themselves. What's That? How Will You Know? Oh, You'll Know All Right. Odd Things, They Say-even Their Looks-will Let The Secret Out. Keep Your Eyes Open. Bless Me, What Do They Teach Them At These Schools." -the Profesor

At Present We Are On The Outside Of The World, The Wrong Side Of The Door. We Discern The Freshness And Purity Of Morning, But They Do Not Make Us Fresh And Pure. We Cannot Mingle With The Splendours We See. But All The Leaves Of The New Testament Are Rustling With The Rumour That It Will Not Always Be So. Some Day, God Willing, We Shall Get In.

Friendship Arises Out Of Mere Companionship When Two Or More Of The Companions Discover That They Have In Common Some Insight Or Interest Or Even Taste Which The Others Do Not Share And Which, Till That Moment, Each Believed To Be His Own Unique Treasure (or Burden).

You Cannot Make Men Good By Law.

Theology Offers You A Working Arrangement, Which Leaves The Scientist Free To Continue His Experiments And The Christian To Continue His Prayers.

Eros Will Have Naked Bodies; Friendship Naked Personalities.

Aslan: You Doubt Your Value. Don't Run From Who You Are.

But As For Lucy, She Was Always Gay And Golden-haired, And All Princes In Those Parts Desired Her To Be Their Queen, And Her Own People Called Her Queen Lucy The Valiant.

Evil Comes From The Abuse Of Free Will

Poetry Too Is A Little Incarnation, Giving Body To What Had Been Before Invisible And Inaudible.

The Doctrine Of The Second Coming Teaches Us That We Do Not And Cannot Know When The World Drama Will End. The Curtain May Be Rung Down At Any Moment: Say, Before You Have Finished Reading This Paragraph.

Christianity Tells People To Repent And Promises Them Forgiveness. It Therefore Has Nothing (as Far As I Know) To Say To People Who Do Not Know They Have Done Anything To Repent Of And Who Do Not Feel That They Need Forgiveness.

But Why,... If You Have A Serious Comment To Make On The Real Life Of Men, Must You Do It By Talking About A Phantasmagoric Never-never Land Of Your Own? Because, I Take It, One Of The Main Things The Author Wants To Say Is That The Real Life Of Men Is Of That Mythical And Heroic Quality.

I Could Well Believe That It Is God's Intention, Since We Have Refused Milder Remedies, To Compel [christians] Into Unity, By Persecution Even. Satan Is Without Doubt Nothing Else Than A Hammer In The Hand Of A Benevolent And Severe God.

They Were Really Getting Quite Fond Of Their Strange Pet And Hoped That Aslan Would Allow Them To Keep It. The Cleverer Ones Were Quite Sure By Now That At Least Some Of The Noises Which Came Out Of His Mouth Had A Meaning. They Christened Him Brandy Because He Made That Noise So Often.

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.

The Books Or The Music In Which We Thought The Beauty Was Located Will Betray Us If We Trust To Them; It Was Not In Them, It Only Came Through Them,and What Came Through Them Was Longing. These Things—the Beauty, The Memory Of Our Own Past—are Good Images Of What We Really Desire; But If They Are Mistaken For The Thing Itself They Turn Into Dumb Idols,breaking The Hearts Of Their Worshippers. For They Are Not The Thing Itself; They Are Only The Scent Of A Flower We Have Not Found, The Echo Of A Tune We Have Not Heard, News From A Country We Have Never Yet Visited.

The Divine Nature Wounds And Perhaps Destroys Us Merely By Being What It Is.

It's All Love Or Sex These Days. Friendship Is Almost As Quaint And Outdated A Notion As Chastity. Soon Friends Will Be Like The Elves And The Pixies - Fabulous Mythical Creatures From A Distant Past.

The Sin Both Of Men And Of Angels, Was Rendered Possible By The Fact That God Gave Us Free Will.

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.

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?

Hardship Often Prepares An Ordinary Person For An Extraordinary Destiny.

Our Problem With Desire Is That We Want Too Little.

For Christianity Is A Fighting Religion. It Thinks God Has Made The World- That Space And Time, Heat And Cold, And All The Colors And Tastes, And All The Animals And Vegetables, Are Things That God 'made Up Out Of His Head' As A Man Makes Up A Story. But It Also Thinks That A Great Many Things Have Gone Wrong With The World That God Made And That God Insists, And Insists Very Loudly, On Our Putting Them Right Again.

The Very Idea Of Freedom Presupposes Some Objective Moral Law Which Overarches Rulers And Ruled Alike...unless We Return To The Crude And Nursery-like Belief In Objective Values, We Perish.

I Am In Love And Out Of It I Will Not Go.

Positive Marriage

Now God, Who Has Made Us, Knows What We Are And That Our Happiness Lies In Him.

Whenever All Men Are...hastening To Be Slaves Or Tyrants We Make Liberalism The Prime Bogey.

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When There Came A Sound That I'd Never Heard The Like Of In All My Born Days. Eh, I Won't Forget That. The Whole Air Was Full Of It, Loud As Thunder But Far Longer, Cool And Sweet As Music Over Water But Strong Enough To Shake The Woods. And I Said To Myself, 'if That's Not The Horn, Call Me A Rabbit.

There Is A Kind Of Happiness And Wonder That Makes You Serious. It Is Too Good To Waste On Jokes.

At A Well In A Yard They Met A Man Who Was Beating A Boy. The Stick Burst Into A Flower In The Mans Hand. He Tried To Drop It, But It Stuck To His Hand. His Arm Became A Branch, His Body The Trunk Of A Tree, His Feet Took Root.

We Are All Fallen Creatures And All Very Hard To Live With.

Forgiving And Being Forgiven Are Two Names For The Same Thing. The Important Thing Is That A Discord Has Been Resolved.

When Catholicism Goes Bad It Becomes The World-old, World-wide Religio Of Amulets And Holy Places And Priestcraft. Protestantism,in Its Corresponding Decay, Becomes A Vague Mist Of Ethical Platitudes. Catholicism Is Accused Of Being Too Much Like All The Other Religions; Protestantism Of Being Insufficiently Like A Religion At All. Hence Plato, With His Transcendent Forms, Is The Doctor Of Protestants; Aristotle, With His Immanent Forms, The Doctor Of Catholics.

The Humblest Praise Most, While Cranks & Malcontents Praise Least. Praise Almost Seems To Be Inner Health Made Audible

Man Is To Be Understood Only In His Relationship To God.

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

A Society Where The Simple Many Obey The Few Seers Can Live; A Society Where All Were Seers Could Live Even More Fully. But A Society Where The Mass Is Still Simple And The Seers Are No Longer Attended To Can Achieve Only Superficiality, Baseness, Ugliness, And In The End Extinction. On Or Back We Must Go: To Stay Here Is Death.

We Are Born Helpless. As Soon As We Are Fully Conscious We Discover Loneliness.

Feelings, And Feelings, And Feelings. Let Me Try Thinking Instead.

Bereavement Is A Universal And Integral Part Of Our Experience Of Love.

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

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

You Cannot Go On Indefinitely Being Just An Ordinary, Decent Egg. We Must Be Hatched Or Go Bad.

Are The Gods Not Just?' 'oh No, Child. What Would Become Us Us If They Were?

We Do Not See Into Men’s Hearts. We Cannot Judge, And Are Indeed Forbidden To Judge.

We Live, In Fact, In A World Starved For Solitude, Silence, And Private: And Therefore Starved For Meditation And True Friendship.

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.

Most Of Us, I Suppose, Have A Secret Country But For Most Of Us It Is Only An Imaginary Country. Edmund And Lucy Were Luckier Than Other People In That Respect.

True Friends Don’t Spend Time Gazing Into Each Other’s Eyes. They May Show Great Tenderness Towards Each Other But They Face In The Same Direction - Toward Common Projects, Goals - Above All, Towards A Common Lord.

As To...old Composers Like Schubert Or Beethoven, I Imagine That, While Modern Music Expresses Both Feeling, Thought And Imagination, They Expressed Pure Feeling. And You Know All Day Sitting At Work, Eating, Walking, Etc., You Have Hundreds Of Feelings That Can't Be Put Into Words. And That Is Why I Think That In A Sense Music Is The Highest Of The Arts, Because It Really Begins Where The Others Leave Off.

Either The Day Must Come When Joy Prevails And All The Makers Of Misery Are No Longer Able To Infect It, Or Else, For Ever And Ever, The Makers Of Misery Can Destroy In Others The Happiness They Reject For Themselves.

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