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Once In Those Very Early Days My Brother Brought Into The Nursery The Lid Of A Biscuit Tin Which He Had Covered With Moss And Garnished With Twigs And Flowers So As To Make It A Toy Garden Or A Toy Forest. That Was The First Beauty I Ever Knew. What The Real Garden Had Failed To Do, The Toy Garden Did. It Made Me Aware Of Nature-not, Indeed, As A Storehouse Of Forms And Colors But As Something Cool, Dewy, Fresh, Exuberant....as Long As I Live My Imagination Of Paradise Will Retain Something Of My Brother's Toy Garden.

-C. S. Lewis

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Once In Those Very

C. S. Lewis

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Once In Those Very Early Days My Brother Brought Into The Nursery The Lid Of A Biscuit Tin Which He Had Covered With Moss And Garnished With Twigs And Flowers So As To Make It A Toy Garden Or A Toy Forest. That Was The First Beauty I Ever Knew. What The Real Garden Had Failed To Do, The Toy Garden Did. It Made Me Aware Of Nature-not, Indeed, As A Storehouse Of Forms And Colors But As Something Cool, Dewy, Fresh, Exuberant....as Long As I Live My Imagination Of Paradise Will Retain Something Of My Brother's Toy Garden.

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Even In Literature And Art, No Man Who Bothers About Originality Will Ever Be Original: Whereas If You Simply Try To Tell The Truth (without Caring Twopence How Often It Has Been Told Before) You Will, Nine Times Out Of Ten, Become Original Without Ever Having Noticed It.

Thus, And Not Otherwise, The World Was Made. Either Something Or Nothing Must Depend On Individual Choices.

Individual Choice

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The Devil Loves 'curing' A Small Fault By Giving You A Great One.

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.

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?

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Fools!" Said The Man, Stamping His Foot With Rage. "that Is The Sort Of Talk That Brought Me Here, And I'd Better Have Been Drowned Or Never Born. Do You Hear What I Say? This Is Where Dreams — Dreams, Do You Understand — Come To Life, Come Real. Not Daydreams: Dreams.

He Died Not For Men, But For Each Man. If Each Man Had Been The Only Man Made, He Would Have Done No Less.

It May Well Be That By Trickery Of Priests Men Have Sometimes Taken A Mortal's Voice For A God's. But It Will Not Work The Other Way. No One Who Hears A God's Voice Takes It For A Man's.

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

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

I Gave In, And Admitted That God Was God.

The Proper Rewards Are Not Simply Tacked On To The Activity For Which They Are Given, But Are The Activity Itself In Consummation.

People Blush At Praise--not Only Praise Of Their Bodies, But Praise Of Anything That Is Theirs.

With My Mother's Death All Settled Happiness, All That Was Tranquil And Reliable, Disappeared From My Life. There Was To Be Much Fun, Many Pleasures, Many Stabs Of Joy; But No More Of The Old Security. It Was Sea And Islands Now; The Great Continent Had Sunk Like Atlantis.

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Do Not Cite The Deep Magic To Me, Witch. I Was There When It Was Written.

We're Free Narnians, Hwin And I, And I Suppose, If You're Running Away To Narnia You Want To Be One Too. In That Case Hwin Isn't Your Horse Any Longer. One Might Just As Well Say You're Her Human.

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.

Badness Cannot Succeed Even In Being Bad In The Same Way In Which Goodness Is Good. Goodness Is, So To Speak, Itself: Badness Is Only Spoiled Goodness. Evil Is A Parasite, Not An Original Thing.

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Whatever He Says, Let His Inner Resolution Be Not To Bear Whatever Comes To Him, But To Bear It 'for A Reasonable Period'--and Let The Reasonable Period Be Shorter Than The Trial Is Likely To Last. It Need Not Be Much Shorter; In Attacks On Patience, Chastity, And Fortitude, The Fun Is To Make The Man Yield Just When (had He But Known It) Relief Was Almost In Sight.

The Longer We Stay In Hell, The More We Become Attached To It.

Be Sure That The Ins And Outs Of Your Individuality Are No Mystery To Him; And One Day They Will No Longer Be A Mystery To You.

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Hail Lord, ...loose My Chains.

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Selfishness Has Never Been Admired.

You Find Out The Strength Of A Wind By Trying To Walk Against It, Not By Lying Down.

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Nonsense Remains Nonsense Even When We Talk It About God.

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

Need-love Says Of A Woman "i Cannot Live Without Her"; Gift-love Longs To Give Her Happiness, Comfort, Protection - If Possible, Wealth; Appreciative Love Gazes And Holds Its Breath And Is Silent, Rejoices That Such A Wonder Should Exist Even If Not For Him, Will Not Be Wholly Dejected By Losing Her, Would Rather Have It So Than Never To Have Seen Her At All.

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

Enemy-occupied Territory---that Is What This World Is. Christianity Is The Story Of How The Rightful King Has Landed, You Might Say Landed In Disguise, And Is Calling Us To Take Part In A Great Campaign Of Sabotage.

It Is Often Little Things That Are Hardest To Stand.

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

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Lion Witch Wardrobe

And So Take Away His Work, Which Was His Life [. . .] And All His Glory And His Great Deeds? Make A Child And A Dotard Of Him? Keep Him To Myself At That Cost? Make Him So Mine That He Was No Longer His?

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

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True Friends... Face In The Same Direction, Toward Common Projects, Interests, Goals.

What Can Be Better Than To Get Out A Book On Saturday Afternoon And Thrust All Mundane Considerations Away Till Next Week.

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[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.

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Practice Makes Perfect

Mere Change Is Not Growth. Growth Is The Synthesis Of Change And Continuity, And Where There Is No Continuity There Is No Growth.

Will You Come With Me To The Mountains? It Will Hurt At First, Until Your Feet Are Hardened. Reality Is Harsh To The Feet Of Shadows. But Will You Come?

The Greatest Evils In The World Will Not Be Carried Out By Men With Guns, But By Men In Suits Sitting Behind Desks

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

Affection Is Responsible For Nine-tenths Of Whatever Solid And Durable Happiness There Is In Our Lives.

You Too? I Thought I Was The Only One.

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I Find That When I Think I Am Asking God To Forgive Me I Am Often In Reality. . . Asking Him Not To Forgive Me But To Excuse Me.

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

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One Of The Marks Of A Certain Type Of Bad Man Is That He Cannot Give Up A Thing Himself Without Wanting Everyone Else To Give It Up.

The Essence Of Religion, In My View, Is The Thirst For An End Higher Than Natural Ends.

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?

Hatred Obscures All Distinctions.

Only Real Risk Passes The Reality Of Faith.

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

Now God Designed The Human Machine To Run On Himself. He Himself Is The Fuel Our Spirits Were Designed To Burn, Or The Food Our Spirits Were Designed To Feed On. There Is No Other.

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.

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

If I, Being What I Am, Can Consider That I Am In Some Sense A Christian, Why Should The Different Vices Of Those People In The Next Pew Prove That Their Religion Is Mere Hypocrisy And Convention?

I Was With Book, As A Woman Is With Child.

Miracles Are For Beginners.

Slowly, Quietly, Like Snow-flakes—like The Small Flakes That Come When It Is Going To Snow All Night —little Flakes Of Me, My Impressions, My Selections, Are Settling Down On The Image Of Her. The Real Shape Wil Be Quite Hidden In The End.

The Central Miracle Asserted By Christians Is The Incarnation. They Say That God Became Man.

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

You Cannot Love A Fellow Creature Fully Till You Love God.

Being Nice Doesn’t Make You Stupid. It Makes You Feel Good Because You Know You Are Gracious Enough To Forgive And Smart Enough To Realize How Distasteful Some People Can Be.

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

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.

Our Heavenly Father Has Provided Many Delightful Inns For Us Along Our Journey, But He Takes Great Care To See That We Do Not Mistake Any Of Them For Home.

It Is Important Early In Life To Acquire The Power Of Reading Sense Wherever You Happen To Be.

If Religion Does Not Make Us Better People, It Will Make Us Very Much Worse. And Of All The Bad Men Who Have Lived, The Religious "bad Man" Is The Worst Of All.

I Read In A Periodical The Other Day That The Fundamental Thing Is How We Think Of God. By God Himself, It Is Not! How God Thinks Of Us Is Not Only More Important, But Infinitely More Important.

Looking For God-or Heaven-by Exploring Space Is Like Reading Or Seeing All Shakespeare's Plays In The Hope That You Will Find Shakespeare As One Of The Characters.

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.

All The Things That Have Ever Deeply Possessed Your Soul Have Been But Hints Of It, Tantalizing Glimpses, Promises Never Quite Fulfilled, Echoes That Died Away Just As They Caught Your Ear. But If It Should Really Become Manifest - If There Ever Came An Echo That Did Not Die Away But Swelled Into The Sound Itself - You Would Know It. Beyond All Possibility Of Doubt You Would Say 'here At Last Is The Thing I Was Made For.'

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.

Could One Start A Stagnation Party-which At General Elections Would Boast That During Its Term Of Office No Event Of The Least Importance Had Taken Place?

To Love Is To Be Vulnerable.

I Thought I Could Describe A State; Make A Map Of Sorrow. Sorrow, However, Turns Out To Be Not A State, But A Process. It Needs Not A Map, But A History, And If I Don't Stop Writing That History At Some Quite Arbitrary Point, There's No Reason Why I Should Ever Stop.

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

It Is Hard To Have Patience With People Who Say 'there Is No Death' Or 'death Doesn't Matter.' There Is Death. And Whatever Is Matters. And Whatever Happens Has Consequences, And It And They Are Irrevocable And Irreversible. You Might As Well Say That Birth Doesn't Matter.

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.

I Sometimes Pray Not For Self-knowledge In General But For Just So Much Self Knowledge At The Moment As I Can Bear And Use At The Moment; The Little Daily Dose.

I Am A Product Of Long Corridors, Empty Sunlit Rooms, Upstairs Indoor Silences, Attics Explored In Solitude, Distant Noises Of Gurgling Cisterns And Pipes, And The Noise Of Wind Under The Tiles. Also, Of Endless Books.

Things Always Work According To Their Nature.

Look For The Valleys, The Green Places, And Fly Through Them. There Will Always Be A Way Through.

On Many Questions And Specially In View Of The Marriage Bed, The Puritans Were The Indulgent Party, . . . They Were Much More Chestertonian Than Their Adversaries. The Idea That A Puritan Was A Repressed And Repressive Person Would Have Astonished Sir Thomas More And Luther About Equally.

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

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.

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

If Anyone Would Like To Acquire Humility, The First Step Is To Realize One Is Proud. Nothing Can Be Done Before It.

A Myth Is A Lie That Conveys A Truth.

Believe In God Like You Believe In The Sunrise. Not Because You Can See It, But Because You Can See All It Touches.

Pure, Spiritual, Intellectual Love Shot Form Their Faces Like Barbedlightning. It Was So Unlike The Love We Experience That Its Expressioncould Easily Be Mistaken For Ferocity.

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

The Purpose Of All Opprobrious Language Is, Not To Describe, But To Hurt - Even When, Like Hamlet, We Make Only The Shadow-passes Of A Soliloquised Combat. We Call The Enemy Not What We Think He Is But What We Think He Would Least Like To Be Called.

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

He Who Has Not Forgiven An Enemy Has Never Yet Tasted One Of The Most Sublime Enjoyments Of Life.

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

An 'impersonal God'-well And Good. A Subjective God Of Beauty, Truth And Goodness, Inside Our Own Heads-better Still. A Formless Life-force Surging Through Us, A Vast Power Which We Can Tap-best Of All. But God Himself, Alive, Pulling At The Other End Of The Cord, Perhaps Approaching At An Infinite Speed, The Hunter, King, Husband-that Is Quite Another Matter.

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.

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

It Is A Happy Moment When Our Desire Crosses With The Will Of Heavenly Father.

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.

I Think I Am Beginning To Understand Why Grief Feels Like Suspense. It Comes From The Frustration Of So Many Impulses That Had Become Habitual. Thought After Thought Feeling After Feeling Action After Action Had H. For Their Object. Now Their Target Is Gone. I Keep On Through Habit Fitting An Harrow To The String Then I Remember And Have To Lay The Bow Down. So Many Roads Lead Through To H. I Set Out On One Of Them. But Now There's An Impassable Frontier-post Across It. So Many Roads Once Now So Many Culs De Sac.

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

Meaningless Combinations Of Words Do Not Suddenly Acquire Meaning Simply Because We Prefix To Them The Two Other Words ' God Can'.

Thirst Was Made For Water; Inquiry For Truth. What You Now Call The Free Play Of Inquiry Has Neither More Nor Less To Do With The Ends For Which Intelligence Was Given You Than Masturbation Has To Do With Marriage.

Many People Think Their Prayers Are Never Answered Because It Is The Answered Ones They Forget.

To Be In Love Involves The Most Irresistible Conviction That One Will Go On Being In Love Until One Dies, And That Possession Of The Beloved Will Confer, Not Merely Frequent Ecstasies, But Settled, Fruitful, Deep-rooted, Lifelong Happiness.

The Enemy Wants To Bring The Man To A State Of Mind In Which He Could Design The Best Cathedral In The World, And Know It To Be The Best, And Rejoice In The Fact, Without Being Any More (or Less) Or Otherwise Glad At Having Done It Than He Would Be If It Had Been Done By Another. The Enemy Wants Him, In The End, To Be So Free From Any Bias In His Own Favour That He Can Rejoice In His Own Talents As Frankly And Gratefully As In His Neighbour's Talents--or In A Sunrise, An Elephant, Or A Waterfall.

They Open A Door And Enter A World

As Venus Within Eros Does Not Really Aim At Pleasure, So Eros Does Not Aim At Happiness. We May Think He Does, But When He Is Brought To The Test It Proves Otherwise... For It Is The Very Mark Of Eros That When He Is In Us We Had Rather Share Unhappiness With The Beloved Than Be Happy On Any Other Terms.

No Philosophical Theory Which I Have Yet Come Across Is A Radical Improvement On The Words Of Genesis, That 'in The Beginning God Made Heaven And Earth'.

The Christian "doctrines" Are Translations Into Our Concepts And Ideas Of That Which God Has Already Expressed In Language More Adequate, Namely The Actual Incarnation, Crucifixion, And Resurrection

The Present Is The Only Time In Which Any Duty May Be Done Or Grace Received.

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

The Life-force Is A Sort Of Tame God. You Can Switch It On When You Want, But It Will Not Bother You. All The Thrills Of Religion And None Of The Cost. Is The Life-force The Greatest Achievement Of Wishful Thinking The World Has Yet Seen?

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

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.

The Thing Is To Rely On God. The Time Will Come When You Will Regard All This Misery As A Small Price To Pay For Having Been Brought To That Dependence. Meanwhile, The Trouble Is That Relying On God Has To Begin All Over Again Every Day As If Nothing Has Yet Been Done.

I Do Not Think That All Who Choose Wrong Roads Perish; But Their Rescue Consists In Being Put Back On The Right Road.

And For All I Can Tell, The Only Difference Is That What Many See We Call A Real Thing, And What Only One Sees We Call A Dream. But Things That Many See May Have No Taste Or Moment In Them At All, And Things That Are Shown Only To One May Be Spears And Water-spouts Of Truth From The Very Depth Of Truth.

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.

Would It Not Be Better To Be Dead Than To Have This Horrible Fear That Aslan Has Come And Is Not Like The Aslan We Have Believed In And Longed For? It Is As If The Sun Rose One Day And Were A Black Sun.

The Opposite Of Love Is Not Hate, But Power

Certain Things, If Not Seen As Lovely Or Detestable, Are Not Being Correctly Seen At All.

Our Problem With Desire Is That We Want Too Little.

Love, Having Become A God, Becomes A Demon.

The Heart Never Takes The Place Of The Head: But It Can, And Should, Obey It.

Submit To Death, Death Of Your Ambitions And Favorite Wishes Every Day And Death Of Your Whole Body In The End: Submit With Every Fiber Of Your Being, And You Will Find Eternal Life. Keep Back Nothing. Nothing That You Have Not Given Away Will Be Really Yours. Nothing In You That Has Not Died Will Ever Be Raised From The Dead. . . Look To Christ And You Will Find Him, And With Him Everything Else Thrown In.

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

Some Have Paid Me An Undeserved Compliment By Supposing That My Letters Were The Ripe Fruit Of Many Years' Study In Moral And Ascetic Theology. They Forgot That There Is An Equally Reliable, Though Less Creditable, Way Of Learning How Temptation Works.

Reason Is The Natural Order Of Truth; But Imagination Is The Organ Of Meaning.

As Christians We Are Tempted To Make Unnecessary Concessions To Those Outside The Faith. We Give In Too Much. Now, I Don't Mean That We Should Run The Risk Of Making A Nuisance Of Ourselves By Witnessing At Improper Times, But There Comes A Time When We Must Show That We Disagree.

"welcome, Prince," Said Aslan. "do You Feel Yourself Sufficient To Take Up The Kingship Of Narnia?" "i - I Don't Think I Do, Sir," Said Caspian. "i'm Only A Kid." "good," Said Aslan. "if You Had Felt Yourself Sufficient, It Would Have Been A Proof That You Were Not."

If You Ask Why We Should Obey God, In The Last Resort The Answer Is, 'i Am.' To Know God Is To Know That Our Obedience Is Due To Him.

Whenever You Find A Man Who Says He Does Not Believe In A Real Right And Wrong, You Will Find The Same Man Going Back On This A Moment Later. He May Break His Promise To You, But If You Try Breaking One To Him He Will Be Complaining 'it's Not Fair' Before You Can Say Jack Robinson.

I#pray Because The Need Flows Out Of Me All The Time-walking And Sleeping. It Does Not Change #‎ God - It Changes Me.

[m]an Has Been Accustomed, Ever Since He Was A Boy, To Having A Dozen Incompatible Philosophies Dancing About Together Inside His Head. He Doesn't Think Of Doctrines As Primarily "true" Or "false," But As "academic" Or "practical," "outworn" Or "contemporary," "conventional" Or "ruthless." Jargon, Not Argument, Is Your Best Ally In Keeping Him From The Church. Don't Waste Time Trying To Make Him Think That Materialism Is True! Make Him Think It Is Strong Or Stark Or Courageous—that It Is The Philosophy Of The Future. That's The Sort Of Thing He Cares About.

The Idea Which...shuts Out The Second Coming From Our Minds, The Idea Of The World Slowly Ripening To Perfection, Is A Myth, Not A Generalization From Experience.

She Did Not Shut It Properly Because She Knew That It Is Very Silly To Shut Oneself Into A Wardrobe, Even If It Is Not A Magic One.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

Christ Offers Something For Nothing: He Even Offers Everything For Nothing.

If They Embark On This Course The Difference Between The Old And The New Education Will Be An Important One. Where The Old Initiated, The New Merely 'conditions'. The Old Dealt With Its Pupils As Grown Birds Deal With Young Birds When They Teach Them To Fly; The New Deals With Them More As The Poultry-keeper Deals With Young Birds- Making Them Thus Or Thus For Purposes Of Which The Birds Know Nothing. In A Word, The Old Was A Kind Of Propagation-men Transmitting Manhood To Men; The New Is Merely Propaganda.

You Never Know What You Can Do Until You Try, And Very Few Try Unless They Have To.

I'm Hunger. I'm Thirst. Where I Bite, I Hold Till I Die, And Even After Death They Must Cut Out My Mouthful From My Enemy's Body And Bury It With Me. I Can Fast A Hundred Years And Not Die. I Can Lie A Hundred Nights On The Ice And Not Freeze. I Can Drink A River Of Blood And Not Burst. Show Me Your Enemies.

Five Senses; An Incurably Abstract Intellect; A Haphazardly Selective Memory; A Set Of Preconceptions And Assumptions So Numerous That I Can Never Examine More Than A Minority Of Them - Never Become Even Conscious Of Them All.

Prosperity Knits A Man To The World.

Screwtape Letters

And A Charge Of Lying Against Someone Whom You Have Always Found Truthful Is A Very Serious Thing; A Very Serious Thing Indeed.

A Clever Arrangement Of Bad Eggs Will Never Make A Good Omelet.

Lucy Went First, Biting Her Lip And Trying Not To Say All The Things She Thought Of Saying To Susan. But She Forgot Them When She Fixed Her Eyes On Aslan.

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

Prayer Does Not Change God; It Changes Me.

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.

In A Word, We May Reasonably Hope For The Virtual Abolition Of Education When I'm As Good As You Has Fully Had Its Way. All Incentives To Learn And All Penalties For Not Learning Will Vanish.the Few Who Might Want To Learn Will Be Prevented; Who Are They To Overtop Their Fellows? And Anyway The Teachers-or Should I Say, Nurses?-will Be Far Too Busy Reassuring The Dunces And Patting Them On The Back To Waste Any Time On Real Teaching. We Shall No Longer Have To Plan And Toil To Spread Imperturable Conceit And Incurable Ignorance Among Men. The Little Vermin Themselves Will Do It For Us.

A Promise Must Be About Actions: No One Can Promise To Go On Feeling A Certain Way.

There Seems To Be Hardly Any One Among My Acquaintance From Whom I Have Not Learned.

The Christians Say That God Has Done Miracles. The Modern World, Even When It Believes In God, And Even When It Has See The Defenselessness Of Nature, Does Not. It Thinks God Would Not Do That Sort Of Thing.

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

How Incessant And Great Are The Ills With Which A Prolonged Old Age Is Replete.

... Believing In A God Whom We Cannot But Regard As Evil, And Then, In Mere Terrified Flattery Calling Him 'good' And Worshipping Him Is A Still Greater Danger... The Ultimate Question Is Whether The Doctrine Of The Goodness Of God Or That Of The Inerrancy Of Scripture Is To Prevail When They Conflict. I Think The Doctrine Of The Goodness Of God Is The More Certain Of The Two. Indeed, Only That Doctrine Renders This Worship Of Him Obligatory Or Even Permissable.

There Is Something Which Unites Magic And Applied Science (technology) While Separating Them From The "wisdom" Of Earlier Ages. For The Wise Men Of Old, The Cardinal Problem Of Human Life Was How To Conform The Soul To Objective Reality, And The Solution Was Wisdom, Self-discipline , And Virtue. For The Modern, The Cardinal Problem Is How To Conform Reality To The Wishes Of Man, And The Solution Is A Technique.

It Would Seem That Our Lord Finds Our Desires Not Too Strong, But Too Weak. We Are Half-hearted Creatures, Fooling About With Drink And Sex And Ambition When Infinite Joy Is Offered Us, Like An Ignorant Child Who Wants To Go On Making Mud Pies In A Slum Because He Cannot Imagine What Is Meant By The Offer Of A Holiday At The Sea. We Are Far Too Easily Pleased.

A Pipe Gives A Wise Man Time To Think And A Fool Something To Stick In His Mouth.

When We Want To Be Something Other Than The Thing God Wants Us To Be, We Must Be Wanting What, In Fact, Will Not Make Us Happy.

Men Became Scientific Because They Expected Law In Nature, And They Expected Law In Nature Because They Believed In A Law Giver.

Reasoning Is Never, Like Poetry, Judged From The Outside At All.

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