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The Human Mind Is Generally Far More Eager To Praise And Dispraise Than To Describe And Define. It Wants To Make Every Distinction A Distinction Of Value; Hence Those Fatal Critics Who Can Never Point Out The Differing Quality Of Two Poets Without Putting Them In An Order Of Preference As If They Were Candidates For A Prize.

-C. S. Lewis

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The Human Mind Is

C. S. Lewis

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The Human Mind Is Generally Far More Eager To Praise And Dispraise Than To Describe And Define. It Wants To Make Every Distinction A Distinction Of Value; Hence Those Fatal Critics Who Can Never Point Out The Differing Quality Of Two Poets Without Putting Them In An Order Of Preference As If They Were Candidates For A Prize.

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What Seem Our Worst Prayers May Really Be, In God's Eyes, Our Best. Those, I Mean, Which Are Least Supported By Devotional Feeling. For These May Come From A Deeper Level Than Feeling. God Sometimes Seems To Speak To Us Most Intimately When He Catches Us, As It Were, Off Our Guard.

We Were Made Not Primarily That We May Love God, But That God May Love Us.

Christ Died For Men Precisely Because Men Are Not Worth Dying For; To Make Them Worth It.

All Joy... Emphasizes Our Pilgrim Status; Always Reminds, Beckons, Awakens Desire. Our Best Havings Are Wantings.

When We See The Face Of God We Shall Know That We Have Always Known It. He Has Been A Party To, Has Made, Sustained And Moved Moment By Moment Within, All Our Earthly Experiences Of Innocent Love.

Miracles Are A Retelling In Small Letters Of The Very Same Story Which Is Written Across The Whole World In Letters Too Large For Some Of Us To See.

If No Set Of Moral Ideas Were Truer Or Better Than Any Other, There Would Be No Sense In Preferring Civilised Morality To Savage Morality.

We Must Get Over Wanting To Be Needed-this Is The Hardest Of All Temptations To Resist

Aren't All These Notes The Senseless Writings Of A Man Who Won't Accept The Fact That There Is Nothing We Can Do With Suffering Except To Suffer It?

The Human Mind Is Generally Far More Eager To Praise And Dispraise Than To Describe And Define. It Wants To Make Every Distinction A Distinction Of Value; Hence Those Fatal Critics Who Can Never Point Out The Differing Quality Of Two Poets Without Putting Them In An Order Of Preference As If They Were Candidates For A Prize.

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.

When God Becomes A Man And Lives As A Creature Among His Own Creatures In Palestine, Then Indeed His Life Is One Of Supreme Self-sacrifice And Leads To Calvary.

I Have Discovered That The People Who Believe Most Strongly In The Next Life Do The Most Good In The Present One.

The Standard That Measures Two Things Is Something Different From Either. You Are, In Fact, Comparing Them Both With Some Real Morality, Admitting That There Is Such A Thing As A Real Right, Independent Of What People Think, And That Some People's Ideas Get Nearer To That Real Right Than Others.

I Gave In, And Admitted That God Was God, And Knelt And Prayed: Perhaps, That Night, The Most Dejected And Reluctant Convert In All England.

Quarrelling Means Trying To Show That The Other Man Is In The Wrong. (and) There Is No Sense In Trying To Do That Unless You And He Had Some Sort Of Agreement As To What Righ And Wrong Are.

It Is By Human Avarice Or Human Stupidity, Not By The Churlishness Of Nature, That We Have Poverty And Overwork.

Wouldn't He Know Without Being Asked?' Said Polly. 'i've No Doubt He Would,' Said The Horse (still With His Mouth Full). 'but I've A Sort Of An Idea He Likes To Be Asked.

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.

We Must Get Over Wanting To Be Needed.

I Didn’t Go To Religion To Make Me Happy. I Always Knew A Bottle Of Port Would Do That. If You Want A Religion To Make You Feel Really Comfortable, I Certainly Don’t Recommend Christianity.

Christian Inspirational

Whenever You Are Fed Up With Life, Start Writing: Ink Is The Great Cure For All Human Ills, As I Have Found Out Long Ago.

Lucy Said, 'we're So Afraid Of Being Sent Away, Aslan. And You Have Sent Us Back Into Our Own World So Often.' 'no Fear Of That,' Said Aslan. 'have You Not Guessed?' Their Hearts Leapt, And A Wild Hope Rose Within Them. 'there Was A Real Railway Accident,' Said Aslan Softly. 'your Father And Mother And All Of You Are- As You Used To Call It In The Shadowlands- Dead. The Term Is Over: The Holidays Have Begun. The Dream Is Ended: This Is The Morning.

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.

Do Not Dare Not To Dare.

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.

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.

The Very Nature Of Joy Makes Nonsense Of Our Common Distinction Between Having And Wanting.

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.

That's The Worst Of Girls," Said Edmund To Peter And The Dwarf. "they Never Can Carry A Map In Their Heads." "that's Because Our Heads Have Something Inside Them," Said Lucy.

The Natural Life In Each Of Us Is Something Self-centred, Something That Wants To Be Petted And Admired, To Take Advantage Of Other Lives, To Exploit The Whole Universe.

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

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.

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

I Want God, Not My Idea Of God.

Reality The Iconoclast Once More. Heaven Will Solve Our Problems, But Not, I Think, By Showing Us Subtle Reconciliations Between All Our Apparently Contradictory Notions. The Notions Will All Be Knocked From Under Our Feet. We Shall See That There Never Was Any Problem.

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

People Talk As If Grief Were Just A Feeling -- As If It Weren't The Continually Renewed Shock Of Setting Out Again And Again On Familiar Roads And Being Brought Up Short By The Grim Frontier Post That Now Blocks Them.

I Am Often, I Believe, Praying For Others When I Should Be Doing Things For Them. It's So Much Easier To Pray For A Bore Than To Go And See Him.

But Who Can Feel Ugly, When Their Heart Feels Joy

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

A Children's Story That Can Only Be Enjoyed By Children Is Not A Good Children's Story In The Slightest.

In The Ancient World Individuals Have Sold Themselves As Slaves, In Order To Eat. So In Society. Here Is A Witch-doctor Who Can Save Us From The Sorcerers - A War-lord Who Can Save Us From The Barbarians - A Church That Can Save Us From Hell. Give Them What They Ask, Give Ourselves To Them Bound And Blindfold, If Only They Will! Perhaps The Terrible Bargain Will Be Made Again. We Cannot Blame Men For Making It. We Can Hardly Wish Them Not To. Yet We Can Hardly Bear That They Should.

An Obligation To Feel Can Freeze Feelings.

The Longest Way Round Is The Shortest Way Home

Cobbles And Kettledrums! ...i Hope This Madness Isn't Going To End In A Moonlit Climb And Broken Necks.

[the Witch] 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 Start Working Backwards.

I Have Been Suspected Of Being What Is Called A Fundamentalist. That Is Because I Never Regard Any Narrative As Unhistorical Simply On The Ground That It Includes The Miraculous.

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.

You People Have No Imagination!

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

Perfect Humility Dispenses With Modesty.

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

Why Love, If Losing Hurts So Much? I Have No Answers Anymore: Only The Life I Have Lived. Twice In That Life I've Been Given The Choice: As A Boy And As A Man. The Boy Chose Safety, The Man Chooses Suffering. The Pain Now Is Part Of The Happiness Then. That's The Deal.

Most Of Us Know What We Should Expect To Find In A Dragon's Lair, But, As I Said Before, Eustace Had Read Only The Wrong Books. They Had A Lot To Say About Exports And Imports And Governments And Drains, But They Were Weak On Dragons.

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.

We Ought To Give Thanks For All Fortune: If It Is Good, Because It Is Good; If Bad, Because It Works In Us Patience, Humility, Contempt Of This World And The Hope Of Our Eternal Country.

A Universe Whose Only Claim To Be Believed In Rests On The Validity Of Inference Must Not Start Telling Us The Inference Is Invalid.

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

We Must Show Our Christian Colors, If We Are To Be True To Jesus Christ. We Cannot Remain Silent Or Concede Everything Away.

And So For A Time It Looked As If All The Adventures Were Coming To And End; But That Was Not To Be.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

No Mind Is So Good That It Does Not Need Another Mind To Counter And Equal It, And To Save It From Conceit And Bigotry And Folly

The Future Is, Of All Things, The Thing Least Like Eternity. It Is The Most Temporal Part Of Time--for The Past Is Frozen And No Longer Flows, And The Present Is All Lit Up With Eternal Rays.

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

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.

The People With Very Hard Problems Are Understood By God. He Knows What Wretched Machines They Are Trying To Drive. Some Day He Will Fling Them Away And Give Those People New Ones; Then They May Astonish Everyone, For They Learned Their Driving In A Hard School. Some Of The Last Will Be First And Some Of The First Will Be Last.

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

Few Men Looked On Her Without Becoming, In A Certain Fashion, Her Lovers. But It Was The Kind Of Love That Made Them Not Less True, But Truer, To Their Own Wives.

Heaven Is Reality Itself. All That Is Fully Real Is Heavenly. For All That Can Be Shaken Will Be Shaken And Only The Unshakeable Remains.

Though Under Earth, And Throneless Now I Be Yet While I Lived All Earth Was Under Me.

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

What The Soul Cries Out For Is The Resurrection Of The Senses. Even In This Life, Matter Would Be Nothing To Us If It Were Not The Source Of Sensations.

To Please God… To Be A Real Ingredient In The Divine Happiness… To Be Loved By God, Not Merely Pitied, But Delighted In As An Artist Delights In His Work Or A Father In A Son- It Seems Impossible, A Weight Or Burden Of Glory Which Our Thoughts Can Hardly Sustain. But So It Is.

“who Are You?” One Who Has Waited Long For You To Speak.

Pride Gets No Pleasure Out Of Having Something, Only Out Of Having More Of It Than The Next Man.

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

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.

Hell Is A State Of Mind -- Ye Never Said A Truer Word. And Every State Of Mind, Left To Itself, Every Shutting Up Of The Creature Within The Dungeon Of Its Own Mind -- Is, In The End, Hell. But Heaven Is Not A State Of Mind. Heaven Is Reality Itself. All That Is Fully Real Is Heavenly.

Friends Are Like Coals In A Fire - Together, They Glow; Apart, They Grow Cold.

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

Holy Places Are Dark Places. It Is Life And Strength, Not Knowledge And Words, That We Get In Them. Holy Wisdom Is Not Clear And Thin Like Water, But Thick And Dark Like Blood.

Everyone Feels Benevolent If Nothing Happens To Be Annoying Him At The Moment.

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.

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.

Can A Mortal Ask Questions Which God Finds Unanswerable? Quite Easily, I Should Think. All Nonsense Questions Are Unanswerable. How Many Hours Are In A Mile? Is Yellow Square Or Round? Probably Half The Questions We Ask - Half Our Great Theological And Metaphysical Problems - Are Like That.

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

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

I Now See That I Spent Most Of My Life In Doing Neither What I Ought Nor What I Liked.

Screwtape Letters

The Game Is To Have Them All Running About With Fire Extinguishers When There Is A Flood, And All Crowding To That Side Of The Boat Which Is Already Nearly Gunwale Under.

Nonsense Remains Nonsense Even When We Talk It About God.

Badness Is Only Spoiled Goodness.

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.

The Christian Does Not Think God Will Love Us Because We Are Good, But That God Will Make Us Good Because He Loves Us.

And Out Of That Hopeless Attempt Has Come Nearly All That We Call Human History—money, Poverty, Ambition, War, Prostitution, Classes, Empires, Slavery—the Long Terrible Story Of Man Trying To Find Something Other Than God Which Will Make Him Happy.

Good Beats Upon The Damned Incessantly As Sound Waves Beat On The Ears Of The Deaf, But They Cannot Receive It. Their Fists Are Clenched, Their Teeth Are Clenched, Their Eyes Fast Shut. First They Will Not, In The End They Cannot, Open Their Hands For Gifts, Or Their Mouth For Food, Or Their Eyes To See.

And All The Time - Such Is The Tragic Comedy Of Our Situation - We Continue To Clamor For Those Very Qualities We Are Rendering Impossible. We Make Men Without Chests And Expect Of Them Virtue And Enterprise. We Laugh At Honor And Are Shocked To Find Traitors In Our Midst. We Castrate And Bid The Geldings Be Fruitful.

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.

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

Never Use Abstract Nouns When Concrete Ones Will Do. If You Mean “more People Died” Don’t Say “mortality Rose.

Most Of Us Need The Crutch At Times; But Of Course It Is Idiotic To Use The Crutch When Our Own Legs (our Own Loves, Tastes, Habits Etc.) Can Do The Journey On Their Own.

For You Will Certainly Carry Out God's Purpose, However You Act, But It Makes A Difference To You Whether You Serve Like Judas Or Like John.

Making A Difference

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

Fallen Man Is Not Simply An Imperfect Creature Who Needs Improvement: He Is A Rebel Who Must Lay Down His Arms.

Every Sin Is The Distortion Of An Energy Breathed Into Us.

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

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

We Do Not Want Merely To See Beauty... We Want Something Else Which Can Hardly Be Put Into Words- To Be United With The Beauty We See, To Pass Into It, To Receive It Into Ourselves, To Bathe In It, To Become Part Of It. That Is Why We Have Peopled Air And Earth And Water With Gods And Goddesses, And Nymphs And Elves.

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

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

There Is No Doctrine Which I Would More Willingly Remove From Christianity Than The Doctrine Of Hell, If It Lay In My Power. But It Has The Support Of Scripture And, Especially, Of Our Lord's Own Words; It Has Always Been Held By The Christian Church, And It Has The Support Of Reason.

An Explanation Of Cause Is Not A Justification By Reason.

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

Screwtape Letters

Devils Are Depicted With Bats' Wings And Good Angels With Birds' Wings, Not Because Anyone Holds That Moral Deterioration Would Be Likely To Turn Feathers Into Membrane, But Because Most Men Like Birds Better Than Bats.

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

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

Enemy-occupied Territory - That Is What This World Is.

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.

The Happiness Which God Designs For His Higher Creatures Is The Happiness Of Being Freely, Voluntarily United To Him.

You May Forget That You Are At Every Moment Totally Dependent On God.

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.

You Know What This Is, I Suppose. Religious Melancholia. Stop While There Is Time. If You Dive, You Dive Into Insanity.

When Humans Should Have Become As Perfect In Voluntary Obedience As The Inanimate Creation Is In Its Lifeless Obedience, Then They Will Put On Its Glory, Or Rather That Greater Glory Of Which Nature Is Only The First Sketch.

There Are Two Equal And Opposite Errors Into Which Our Race Can Fall About The Devils. One Is To Disbelieve In Their Existence. The Other Is To Believe, And To Feel An Excessive And Unhealthy Interest In Them. They Themselves Are Equally Pleased By Both Errors And Hail A Materialist Or A Magician With The Same Delight.

This Is My Endlessly Recurrent Temptation: To Go Down To That Sea, And There Neither Dive Nor Swim Nor Float, But Only Dabble And Splash, Careful Not To Get Out Of My Depth And Holding On To The Lifeline Which Connects Me With My Things Temporal.

You Can't Get A Cup Of Tea Large Enough Or A Book Long Enough To Suit Me.

Remember, He Is Not, Like You, A Pure Spirit. Never Having Been A Human (oh That Abominable Advantage Of The Enemy's) You Don't Realize How Enslaved They Are To The Pressure Of The Ordinary.

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

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

I Have Seen Something Like It Happen In Battle. A Man Was Coming At Me, I At Him, To Kill. Then Came A Sudden Great Gust Of Wind That Wrapped Out Cloaks Over Our Swords And Almost Over Our Eyes, So That We Could Do Nothing To One Another But Must Fight The Wind Itself. And That Ridiculous Contention, So Foreign To The Business We Were On, Set Us Both Laughing, Face To Face - Friends For A Moment - And Then At Once Enemies Again And Forever.

You Will Not Find The Warrior, The Poet, The Philosopher Or The Christian By Staring Into His Eyes As If He Were Your Mistress: Better Fight Beside Him, Read With Him, Argue With Him, Pray With Him.

Your People Eat Dry And Tasteless Flesh But It Is Off Plates As Smooth As Ivory And As Round As The Sun.

If You Think Of This World As A Place Intended Simply For Our Happiness, You Find It Quite Intolerable: Think Of It As A Place Of Training And Correction And It's Not So Bad.

Christianity Is A Fighting Religion.

It's Always Winter But It's Never Christmas.

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?

Goodness Is, So To Speak, Itself; Badness Is Only Spoiled Goodness. And There Must Be Something Good First Before It Can Be Spoiled.

Now That I Am A Christian I Do Have Moods In Which The Whole Thing Looks Improbable: But When I Was An Atheist I Had Moods In Which Christianity Looked Terribly Probable.

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.

Love As Distinct From "being In Love" Is Not Merely A Feeling. It Is A Deep Unity, Maintained By The Will And Deliberately Strengthened By Habit.

Meanwhile, Little People Like You And Me, If Our Prayers Are Sometimes Granted, Beyond All Hope And Probability, Had Better Not Draw Hasty Conclusions To Our Own Advantage. If We Were Stronger, We Might Be Less Tenderly Treated. If We Were Braver, We Might Be Sent, With Far Less Help, To Defend Far More Desperate Posts In The Great Battle.

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

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

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.

Lucy Woke Out Of The Deepest Sleep You Can Imagine, With The Feeling That The Voice She Liked Best In The World Had Been Calling Her Name.

We Can Rest Contentedly In Our Sins And In Our Stupidities, And Anyone Who Has Watched Gluttons Shoveling Down The Most Exquisite Foods As If They Did Not Know What They Were Eating Will Admit That We Can Ignore Even Pleasure. But Pain Insists Upon Being Attended To. God Whispers To Us In Our Pleasures, Speaks In Our Consciences, But Shouts In Our Pains. It Is His Megaphone To Rouse A Deaf World.

The Full Acting Out Of The Self's Surrender To God Therefore Demands Pain: This Action, To Be Perfect, Must Be Done From The Pure Will To Obey, In The Absence, Or In The Teeth, Of Inclination

When We Are Such As He Can Love Without Impediment, We Shall In Fact Be Happy.

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 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.

Pride, On The Other Hand, Is The Mother Of All Sins, And The Original Sin Of Lucifer.... An Instrument Strung, But Preferring To Play Itself Because It Thinks It Knows The Tune Better Than The Musician

It Is The Magician's Bargain: Give Up Our Soul, Get Power In Return. But Once Our Souls, That Is, Ourselves, Have Been Given Up, The Power Thus Conferred Will Not Belong To Us. We Shall In Fact Be The Slaves And Puppets Of That To Which We Have Given Our Souls.

The Son Of God Became A Man To Enable Men To Become Sons Of God." ~ Mere Christianity, By C. S. Lewis

We Must Beware Of The Past, Mustn't We? I Mean That Any Fixing Of The Mind On Old Evils Beyond What Is Absolutely Necessary For Repenting Our Own Sins And Forgiving Those Of Others Is Certainly Useless And Usually Bad For Us. Notice In Dante That The Lost Souls Are Entirely Concerned With Their Past! Not So The Saved.

Beloved," Said The Glorious One, "unless Thy Desire Had Been For Me Thou Wouldst Not Have Sought So Long And So Truly. For All Find What They Truly Seek.

As The King Governs By His Executive, So Reason In Man Must Rule The Mere Appetites By Means Of The 'spirited Element.'

All Names Will Soon Be Restored To Their Proper Owners.

Lion The Witch And The Wardrobe

That Is The Key To History. Terrific Energy Is Expended - Civilizations Are Built Up - Excellent Institutions Devised; But Each Time Something Goes Wrong. Some Fatal Flaw Always Brings The Selfish And Cruel People To The Top, And Then It All Slides Back Into Misery And Ruin. In Fact, The Machine Conks. It Seems To Start Up All Right And Runs A Few Yards, And Then It Breaks Down.

I Do Not Expect Old Heads On Young Shoulders.

The Beauty Of Life, Is That You Don't Have To Be Modernly Beautiful To Live It.

And Men Said That The Blood Of The Stars Flowed In Her Veins

When I Lay These Questions Before God I Get No Answer. But A Rather Special Sort Of 'no Answer.' It Is Not The Locked Door. It Is More Like A Silent, Certainly Not Uncompassionate, Gaze. As Though He Shook His Head Not In Refusal But Waiving The Question. Like, 'peace, Child; You Don't Understand.

A Myth Is A Lie That Conveys A Truth.

I Think That If God Forgives Us We Must Forgive Ourselves. Otherwise, It Is Almost Like Setting Up Ourselves As A Higher Tribunal Than Him.

Love Is More Than An Emotion, It Is A Decision.

The Universe Rings True Whenever You Fairly Test It.

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.

We Have Lost The Invaluable Faculty Of Being Shocked A Faculty Which Has Hitherto Almost Distinguished The Man Or Woman From The Beast Or Child.

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

War Creates No Absolutely New Situation: It Simply Aggravates The Permanent Human Situation So That We Can No Longer Ignore It. Human Life Has Always Been Lived On The Edge Of A Precipice.

Do I Think Well Of Myself, Think Myself A Nice Chap? Well, I Am Afraid I Sometimes Do (and Those Are, No Doubt, My Worst Moments).

It Doesn't Really Matter Whether You Grip The Arms Of The Dentist's Chair Or Let Your Hands Lie In Your Lap. The Drill Drills On.

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

They Have Chosen Cunning Instead Of Belief. Their Prison Is Only In Their Minds, Yet They Are In That Prison; And So Afraid Of Being Taken In That They Cannot Be Taken Out.

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

This Was Bad Grammar Of Course, But That Is How Beavers Talk When They Are Excited; I Mean, In Narnia--in Our World They Usually Don't Talk At All. - The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe

My Son, By All Means Desist From Kicking The Venerable And Enlightened Vizier: For As A Costly Jewel Retains Its Value Even If Hidden In A Dung-hill, So Old Age And Discretion Are To Be Respected Even In The Vile Persons Of Our Subjects. Desist Therefore, And Tell Us What You Desire And Propose.

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

Be Confident Small Immortals. You Are Not The Only Voice That All Things Utter, Nor Is There Eternal Silence In The Places Where You Cannot Come.

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.

I Thought I Could Describe A State; Make A Map Of Sorrow. Sorrow, Hoever, Turns Out To Be Not A State But A Process.

Your Place In Heaven Will Seem To Be Made For You And You Alone, Because You Were Made For It.

The Sweet Heavy Smell Grew Very Much Less. For Though The Whole Fire Had Not Been Put Out, A Good Bit Of It Had, And What Remained Smelled Very Largely Of Burnt Marsh-wiggle, Which Is Not At All An Enchanting Smell.

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

In The Same Way A Christian Is Not A Man Who Never Goes Wrong, But A Man Is Enabled To Repent And Pick Himself Up And Begin Over Again After Each Stumble--because The Christ-life Is Inside Him, Repairing Him All The Time, Enabling Him To Repeat (in Some Degree) The Kind Of Voluntary Death Which Christ Himself Carried Out." - Mere Christianity

If I Find In Myself A Desire Which No Experience In This World Can Satisfy, The Most Probable Explanation Is That I Was Made For Another World.

You Must Ask For God's Help. Even When You Have Done So, It May Seem To You For A Long Time That No Help, Or Less Help Than You Need, Is Being Given. Never Mind. After Each Failure, Ask Forgiveness, Pick Yourself Up, And Try Again. Very Often What God First Helps Us Towards Is Not The Virtue Itself But Just This Power Of Always Trying Again.

Giving To The Poor Is An Essential Part Of Christian Morality.

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

It Is, Of Course, Quite True That God Will Not Love You Any Less, Or Have Less Use For You, If You Happen To Have Been Born With A Very Second-rate Brain.

The Most Precious Gift That Marriage Gave Me Was The Constant Impact Of Something Very Close And Intimate, Yet All The Time Unmistakably Other, Resistant - In A Word, Real.

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

I Think We Must Fully Face The Fact That When Christianity Does Not Make A Man Very Much Better, It Makes Him Very Much Worse... Conversion May Make Of One Who Was, If No Better, No Worse Than An Animal, Something Like A Devil.

I Write For The Unlearned About Things In Which I Am Unlearned Myself.

I Was The Lion Who Forced You To Join With Aravis. I Was The Cat Who Comforted You Among The Houses Of The Dead. I Was The Lion Who Drove The Jackals From You While You Slept. I Was The Lion Who Gave The Horses The New Strength Of Fear For The Last Mill So That You Should Reach King Lune In Time. And I Was The Lion You Do Not Remember Who Pushed The Boat In Which You Lay, A Child Near Death, So That It Came To Shore Where A Man Sat, Wakeful At Midnight, To Receive You.

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