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What Does Seem To Me Poisonous, What Breeds A Type Of Patriotism That Is Pernicious If It Lasts But Not Likely To Last Long In An Educated Adult, Is The Perfectly Serious Indoctrination Of The Young In Knowably False Or Biased History - The Heroic Legend Drably Disguised As Text-book Fact. With This Creeps In The Tacit Assumption That Other Nations Have Not Equally Their Heroes; Perhaps Even The Belief - Surely It Is Very Bad Biology - That We Can Literally 'inherit' Tradition.

-C. S. Lewis

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What Does Seem To

C. S. Lewis

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What Does Seem To Me Poisonous, What Breeds A Type Of Patriotism That Is Pernicious If It Lasts But Not Likely To Last Long In An Educated Adult, Is The Perfectly Serious Indoctrination Of The Young In Knowably False Or Biased History - The Heroic Legend Drably Disguised As Text-book Fact. With This Creeps In The Tacit Assumption That Other Nations Have Not Equally Their Heroes; Perhaps Even The Belief - Surely It Is Very Bad Biology - That We Can Literally 'inherit' Tradition.

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You Asked For A Loving God: You Have One... The Consuming Fire Himself, The Love That Made The Worlds, Persistent As The Artist's Love For His Work And Despotic As A Man's Love For A Dog, Provident And Venerable As A Father's Love For A Child, Jealous, Inexorable, Exacting As Love Between The Sexes. How This Should Be, I Do Not Know: It Passes Reason To Explain Why Any Creatures, Not To Say Creatures Such As We, Should Have A Value So Prodigious In Their Creator's Eyes.

The Surest Way Of Spoiling A Pleasure [is] To Start Examining Your Satisfaction.

When I'm Older I'll Understand" Said Lucy, " I Am Older And I Don't Think I Want To Understand", Replied Edmund

Mercy Detached From Justice Grows Unmerciful.

Love Is Something More Stern And Splendid Than Mere Kindness.

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

Forgiveness Does Not Mean Excusing.

If You Live For The Next World, You Get This One In The Deal; But If You Live Only For This World, You Lose Them Both.

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

The True Christian's Nostril Is To Be Continually Attentive To The Inner Cesspool.

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.

In Such A Fearful World, We Need A Fearless Church

The Proper Aim Of Giving Is To Put The Recipient In A State Where He No Longer Needs Our Gifts...thus A Heavy Task Is Laid Upon Gift-love. It Must Work Toward Its Own Abdication. We Must Aim At Making Ourselves Superfluous. The Hour When We Can Say 'they Need Me No Longer' Should Be Our Reward. But The Instinct, Simply In Its Own Nature, Has No Power To Fulfill This Law.

A Man's Physical Hunger Does Not Prove That Man Will Get Any Bread; He May Die Of Starvation On A Raft In The Atlantic. But Surely A Man's Hunger Does Prove That He Comes Of A Race Which Repairs Its Body By Eating And Inhabits A World Where Eatable Substances Exist. In The Same Way, Though I Do Not Believe (i Wish I Did) That My Desire For Paradise Proves That I Shall Enjoy It, I Think It A Pretty Good Indication That Such A Thing Exists And That Some Men Will.

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

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

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 Fact That You Are Giving Money To Charity Does Not Mean That You Need Not Try To Find Out Whether That Charity Is A Fraud Or Not.

It's So Large" "it's The World Dear, Did You Think It'd Be Small?" "smaller

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.

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

More Like The Real Thing,' Said The Lord Digory Softly. - The Last Battle

We Cannot Understand. The Best Is Perhaps What We Understand Least.

If There Ever Was A Time That Nothing Existed, Then Nothing Would Exist Now

Don't Judge A Man By Where He Is, Because You Don't Know How Far He Has Come.

I Don't Want Him To Live Forever, And I Know That He's Not Going To Live Forever Whether I Want Him To Or Not.

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

Human Beings, All Over The Earth, Have This Curious Idea That They Ought To Believe In A Certain Way, And Can't Really Get Rid Of It.

Reality, Looked At Steadily, Is Unbearable.

You Would Not Call A Man Humane For Ceasing To Set Mousetraps If He Did So Because He Believed There Were No Mice In The House.

A Concentrated Mind And A Sitting Body Make For Better Prayer Than A Kneeling Body And A Mind Half Asleep.

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

The Humans Live In Time But Our Enemy (god) Destines Them For Eternity.

Screwtape Letters

The Church Exists For Nothing Else But To Draw Men Into Christ, To Make Them Little Christs. If They Are Not Doing That, All The Cathedrals, Clergy, Missions, Sermons, Even The Bible Itself, Are Simply A Waste Of Time. God Became Man For No Other Purpose.

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?

Think Of A Country Where People Were Admired For Running Away In Battle, Or Where A Man Felt Proud Of Double-crossing All The People Who Had Been Kindest To Him. You Might Just As Well Try To Imagine A Country Where Two And Two Made Five.

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

Until You Have Given Up Yourself To Him, You Will Not Have A Real Self.

Everywhere, Except In Theology, There Has Been A Vigorous Growth Of Skepticism About Skepticism Itself.

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

At Least He Went On Saying This Till Aslan Had Loaded Him Up With Three Dwarfs, One Dryad, Two Rabbits, And A Hedgehog, That Steadied Him A Bit.

A Great Many People (not You) Do Now Seem To Think That The Mere State Of Being Worried Is In Itself Meritorious. I Don’t Think It Is. We Must, If It So Happens, Give Our Lives For Others: But Even While We’re Doing It, I Think We’re Meant To Enjoy Our Lord And, In Him, Our Friends, Our Food, Our Sleep, Our Jokes, And The Birds’ Song And The Frosty Sunrise.

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

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.

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

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

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.

He Didn't Call His Father And Mother 'father' And 'mother' But Harold And Alberta. They Were Very Up To Date And Advanced People. They Were Vegetarians, Non-smokers And Teetotalers, And Wore A Special Kind Of Underclothes. In Their House There Was Very Little Furniture And Very Few Clothes On The Beds And The Windows Were Always Open.

I Believe Buddhism To Be A Simplification Of Hinduism And Islam To Be A Simplification Of Xianity.

If We Let Ourselves, We Shall Always Be Waiting For Some Distraction Or Other To End Before We Can Really Get Down To Our Work.

Surely Arrested Development Consists Not In Refusing To Lose Old Things But In Failing To Add New Things.

Theocracy Is The Worst Of All Governments. If We Must Have A Tyrant, A Robber Baron Is Far Better Than An Inquisitor. The Baron's Cruelty May Sometimes Sleep, His Cupidity At Some Point Be Sated; And Since He Dimly Knows He Is Doing Wrong He May Possibly Repent. But The Inquisitor Who Mistakes His Own Cruelty And Lust Of Power And Fear For The Voice Of Heaven Will Torment Us Infinitely Because He Torments Us With The Approval Of His Own Conscience And His Better Impulses Appear To Him As Temptations.

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

If A Thing Is Free To Be Good It Is Also Free To Be Bad. And Free Will Is What Has Made Evil Possible. Why, Then, Did God Give Them Free Will? Because Free Will, Though It Makes Evil Possible, Is Also The Only Thing That Makes Possible Any Love Or Goodness Or Joy Worth Having.

In Each Of My Friends There Is Something That Only Some Other Friend Can Fully Bring Out. By Myself I Am Not Large Enough To Call The Whole Man Into Activity; I Want Other Lights Than My Own To Show All His Facets... Hence True Friendship Is The Least Jealous Of Loves. Two Friends Delight To Be Joined By A Third, And Three By A Fourth, If Only The Newcomer Is Qualified To Become A Real Friend. They Can Then Say, As The Blessed Souls Say In Dante, "here Comes One Who Will Augment Our Loves." For In This Love "to Divide Is Not To Take Away.

At The Very Least, They Can Be Persuaded That The Bodily Position Makes No Difference To Their Prayers; For They Constantly Forget[...]that They Are Animals And That Whatever Their Bodies Do Affects Their Souls.

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

The Real Trouble Is That 'kindness' Is A Quality Fatally Easy To Attribute To Ourselves On Quite Inadequate Grounds. Everyone Feels Benevolent If Nothing Happens To Be Annoying Him At The Moment. Thus A Man Easily Comes To Console Himself For All His Other Vices By A Conviction That 'his Heart's In The Right Place' And 'he Wouldn't Hurt A Fly,' Though In Fact He Has Never Made The Slightest Sacrifice For A Fellow Creature. We Think We Are Kind When We Are Only Happy: It Is Not So Easy, On The Same Grounds, To Imagine Oneself Temperate, Chaste, Or Humble.

The Salvation Of A Single Soul Is More Important Than The Production Or Preservation Of All The Epics And Tragedies In The World.

Ambition! We Must Be Careful What We Mean By It. If It Means The Desire To Get Ahead Of Other People - Which Is What I Think It Does Mean - Then It Is Bad. If It Means Simply Wanting To Do A Thing Well, Then It Is Good. It Isn't Wrong For An Actor To Want To Act His Part As Well As It Can Possibly Be Acted, But The Wish To Have His Name In Bigger Type Than The Other Actors Is A Bad One.

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.

Humility, After The First Shock, Is Cheerful Virtue.

Many Things, Such As Loving, Going To Sleep, Or Behaving Unaffectedly - Are Done Worst When We Try Hardest To Do Them.

Miracles Do Not, In Fact, Break The Laws Of Nature.

Surely What A Man Does When He Is Taken Off Guard Is The Best Evidence For What Sort Of Man He Is. If There Are Rats In A Cellar, You Are Most Likely To See Them If You Go In Very Suddenly. But The Suddenness Does Not Create The Rats; It Only Prevents Them From Hiding. In The Same Way The Suddenness Of The Provocation Does Not Make Me Ill Tempered; It Only Shows Me What An Ill-tempered Man I Am.

Inspirational Life

Jesus Was Either A Liar, A Lunatic, Or Lord

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.

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

The Worldly Man Treats Certain People Kindly Because He 'likes' Them: The Christian, Trying To Treat Every One Kindly, Finds Him Liking More And More People As He Goes On - Including People He Could Not Even Have Imagined Himself Liking At The Beginning.

The Happiness Which God Designs For His Higher Creatures Is The Happiness Of Being Freely, Voluntarily United To Him And To Each Other In An Ecstasy Of Love And Delight Compared With Which The Most Rapturous Love Between A Man And A Woman On This Earth Is Mere Milk And Water. And For That They Must Be Free.

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

Whether We Like It Or Not, God Intends To Give Us What We Need, Not What We Now Think We Want

We May Not Be Able To Get Certainty, But We Can Get Probability, And Half A Loaf Is Better Than No Bread.

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

Some People Feel Guilty About Their Anxieties And Regard Them As A Defect Of Faith But They Are Afflictions, Not Sins. Like All Afflictions, They Are, If We Can So Take Them, Our Share In The Passion Of Christ.

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

I Gave Up Christianity At About 14. Came Back To It When Getting On For 30. Not An Emotional Conversion; Almost Purely Philosophical. I Didn't Want To. I'm Not In The Least A Religious Type. I Want To Be Let Alone, To Feel I'm My Own Master; But Since The Facts Seemed To Be Just The Opposite, I Had To Give In.

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.

What Began The Change Was The Very Writing Itself. Let No One Lightly Set About Such A Work. Memory, Once Waked, Will Play The Tyrant.

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.

Gone! And You And I Quite Crestfallen. It’s Always Like That, You Can’t Keep Him; It’s Not As If He Were A Tame Lion.

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

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

Humility Is Self-forgetfulness.

When They Have Really Learned To Love Their Neighbours As Themselves, They Will Be Allowed To Love Themselves As Their Neighbours.

Screwtape Letters

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

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.

You Can't See Anything Properly While Your Eyes Are Blurred With Tears.

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.

Experience: That Most Brutal Of Teachers. But You Learn, My God Do You Learn.

Anger Is The Fluid Love Bleeds When Cut.

Friendship Love

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

I Was Wondering — I Mean — Could There Be Some Mistake? Because Nobody Called Me And Scrubb, You Know. It Was We Who Asked To Come Here. You Would Not Have Called Me Unless I Had Been Calling You.

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

The Most Dangerous Thing You Can Do Is To Take Any One Impulse Of Your Own Nature And Set It Up As The Thing You Ought To Follow At All Costs. There Is Not One Of Them Which Will Not Make Us Into Devils If We Set It Up As An Absolute Guide. You Might Think Love Of Humanity In General Was Safe, But It Is Not. If You Leave Out Justice You Will Find Yourself Breaking Agreements And Faking Evidence In Trials "for The Sake Of Humanity", And Become In The End A Cruel And Treacherous Man.

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

I Can Answer That Only By Hearsay, Returned The Guide, For Pain Is A Secret Which He Has Shared With Your Race And Not With Mine; And You Would Find It As Hard To Explain Suffering To Me As I Would Find It To Reveal To You The Secrets Of The Mountain People. But Those Who Know Best Say This, That Any Liberal Man Would Choose The Pain Of This Desire, Even For Ever, Rather Than The Peace Of Feeling It No Longer; And That Though The Best Thing Is To Have, The Next Best Is To Want, And The Worst Of All Is Not To Want.

I'm Afraid It's Not Much Use To You, Mr. Rumblebuffin.' Not At All. Not At All.' Said The Giant Politely. 'never Met A Nicer Hankerchee.

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.

Her Absence Is Like The Sky, Spread Over Everything.

I See People, As They Approach Me, Trying To Make Up Their Minds Whether They'll 'say Something About It' Or Not. I Hate If They Do, And If They Don't.

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.

A Sensible Human Once Said, "if People Knew How Much Ill-feeling Unselfishness Occasions, It Would Not Be So Often Recommended From The Pulpit"; And Again, "she's The Sort Of Woman Who Lives For Others You Can Always Tell The Others By Their Hunted Expression.

The Future Is Something Which Everyone Reaches At The Rate Of 60 Minutes An Hour, Whatever He Does, Whoever He Is.

And Above All, You Must Be Asking Which Door Is The True One; Not Which Pleases You Best By Its Paint And Panelling…the Question Should Never Be: ‘do I Like That Kind Of Service?’ But ‘are These Doctrines True: Is Holiness There? Does My Conscience Move Me Towards This? Is My Reluctance To Move To This Door Due To My Pride, Or My Mere Taste, Or My Personal Dislike For This Particular Door-keeper?

Both Good And Evil, When They Are Full Grown, Become Retrospective...that Is What Mortals Misunderstand. They Say Of Some Temporary Suffering, 'no Future Bliss Can Make Up For It,' Not Knowing That Heaven, Once Attained, Will Work Backwards And Turn Even That Agony Into A Glory. And Of Some Sinful Pleasure They Say 'let Me But Have This And I'll Take The Consequences': Little Dreaming How Damnation Will Spread Back And Back Into Their Past And Contaminate The Pleasure Of The Sin.

I Have Always At Least, Ever Since I Can Remember Had A Kind Of Longing For Death.

If You Have Once Accepted Christianity, Then Some Of Its Main Doctrines Shall Be Deliberately Held Before Your Mind For Some Time Every Day. That Is Why Daily Prayers And Religious Reading And Churchgoing Are Necessary Parts Of The Christian Life. We Have To Be Continually Reminded Of What We Believe. Neither This Belief Nor Any Other Will Automatically Remain Alive In The Mind. It Must Be Fed.

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

A Particular Ikon An Aid To Devotion May Be Itself A Word Of Art, But That Is Logically Accidental; Its Artistic Merits Will Not Make It A Better ... Ikon. They May Make It A Worse One.

A Man Who Has Been In Another World Does Not Come Back Unchanged. One Can't Put The Difference Into Words. When The Man Is A Friend It May Become Painful: The Old Footing Is Not Easy To Recover.

We Were Made To Be Neither Cerebral Men Nor Visceral Men, But Men. Not Beasts Nor Angels But Men - Things At Once Rational And Animal.

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'.

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.

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.

One Is Given Strength To Bear What Happens To One, But Not The 100 And 1 Different Things That Might Happen.

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

Laziness Means More Work In The Long Run.

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

Child, That Is Why All The Rest Are Now A Horror To Her. That Is What Happens To Those Who Pluck And Eat Fruits At The Wrong Time And In The Wrong Way. Oh, The Fruit Is Good, But They Loath It Ever After.

Provided That Any Of Those Neighbours Sing Out Of Tune Or Have Boots That Squeak, Or Double Chins, Or Odd Clothes, The Patient Will Quite Easily Believe That Their Religion Must Therefore Be Somehow Ridiculous.

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

Vanity Is Really The Least Bad And Most Pardonable Sort. The Vain Person Wants Praise, Applause, Admiration Too Much And Is Always Angling For It. It Is A Fault, But A Childlike And Even (in An Odd Way) A Humble Fault. It Shows That You Are Not Yet Completely Contented With Your Own Admiration. You Value Other People Enough To Want Them To Look At You. You Are In Fact Still Human.

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

We Read To Know We Are Not Alone.

Edmund, Who Was Becoming A Nastier Person Every Minute, Thought That He Had Scored A Great Success, And Went On At Once To Say, 'there She Goes Again. What's The Matter With Her?

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?

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

Oh, Lor!' Said The Boy, Sitting Down On The Grassy Bank At The Edge Of The Shrubbery And Very Quickly Getting Up Again Because The Grass Was Soaking Wet. His Name Was Unfortunately Eustace Scrubb But He Wasn't A Bad Sort.

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

It Is Only When You Are Asked To Believe In Reason Coming From Non-reason That You Must Cry Halt. Human Minds. They Do Not Come From Nowhere.

If You Find That The Reader Of Popular Romances--however Uneducated A Reader, However Bad The Romances--goes Back To His Old Favourites Again And Again, Then You Have Pretty Good Evidence That They Are To Him A Sort Of Poetry.

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

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

It Is Safe To Tell The Pure In Heart That They Shall See God, For Only The Pure In Heart Want To.

God Is Love, And That Love Works Through Men-especially Through The Whole Community Of Christians.

If The Immutable Heart Can Be Grieved By The Puppets Of Its Own Making, It Is Divine Omnipotence, No Other, That Has Subjected It, Freely, And In A Humility That Passes Understanding. If The World Exists Not Chiefly That We May Love God, But That God May Love Us, Yet That Very Fact, On A Deeper Level, Is So For Our Sakes. If He Who In Himself Can Lack Nothing Chooses To Need Us, It Is Because We Need To Be Needed.

Of Course, We Are To Pray For Spiritual Awakening, And In Various Ways We Can Do Something Toward It. But We Must Remember That Neither Paul Nor Apollos Gives The Increase.

To Love You As I Should, I Must Worship God As Creator.

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

My Own Eyes Are Not Enough For Me; I Will See Through Those Of Others.

You Must Have A Capacity To Receive, Or Even Omnipotence Can't Give.

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.

You Have A Traitor There, Aslan," Said The Witch. Of Course Everyone Present Knew That She Meant Edmund. But Edmund Had Got Past Thinking About Himself After All He'd Been Through And After The Talk He'd Had That Morning. He Just Went On Looking At Aslan. It Didn't Seem To Matter What The Witch Said.

We Are Not Meant To Be Perpetually Solemn: We Must Play.

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

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.

Wisdom: The First Error Is That Of The Southern People, And It Consists In Holding That These Eastern And Western Places Are Real Places. Give No Quarter To That Thought, Whether It Threatens You With Fear, Or Tempts You With Hopes. For This Is Superstition And All Who Believe It Will Come In The End To The Swamps, To The South And The Jungles, To The Far South. Part Of The Same Error Is To Think That The Landlord Is A Real Man.

Failures Are Finger Posts On The Road To Achievement.

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.

If We Ignore It The Truth That God Is Love May Slyly Come To Mean For Us The Converse, That Love Is God.

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

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

When We Are Lost In The Woods, The Sight Of A Signpost Is A Great Matter.

If We Discover A Desire Within Us That Nothing In This World Can Satisfy, Also We Should Begin To Wonder If Perhaps We Were Created For Another 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.

All Possible Knowledge, Then, Depends On The Validity Of Reasoning...unless Human Reasoning Is Valid No Science Can Be True.

Obedience Is The Road To Freedom.

We Do Not Truly See Light, We Only See Slower Things Lit By It, So That For Us Light Is On The Edge-the Last Thing We Know Before Things Become Too Swift For Us.

Something Quite Unexpected Has Happened. It Came This Morning Early. For Various Reasons, Not In Themselves At All Mysterious, My Heart Was Lighter Than It Had Been For Many Weeks. ... And Suddenly, At The Very Moment When, So Far, I Mourned H. Least, I Remembered Her Best. Indeed It Was Something (almost) Better Than Memory; An Instantaneous, Unanswerable Impression. To Say It Was Like A Meeting Would Be Going Too Far. Yet There Was That In It Which Tempts One To Use Those Words. It Was As Though The Lifting Of The Sorrow Removed A Barrier.

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.

Part Of Every Misery Is, So To Speak, The Misery's Shadow Or Reflection: The Fact That You Don't Merely Suffer But Have To Keep On Thinking About The Fact That You Suffer. I Not Only Live Each Endless Day In Grief, But Live Each Day Thinking About Living Each Day In Grief.

Enough Had Been Thought, And Said, And Felt, And Imagined. It Was About Time That Something Should Be Done.

It Matters Enormously If I Alienate Anyone From The Truth.

Strictly Speaking, There Are No Such Things As Good And Bad Impulses. Think...of A Piano. It Has Not Got Two Kinds Of Notes On It, The 'right' Notes And The 'wrong' Ones. Every Single Note Is Right At One Time And Wrong At Another. The Moral Law Is Not Any One Instinct Or Set Of Instincts: It Is Something Which Makes A Kind Of Tune (the Tune We Call Goodness Or Right Conduct) By Directing The Instincts.

Your Patient Has Become Humble; Have You Drawn His Attention To The Fact? All Virtues Are Less Formidable To Us Once The Man Is Aware That He Has Them, But This Is Specially True Of Humility.

We Treat Our Dogs As If They Were "almost Human": That Is Why They Really Become "almost Human" In The End.

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

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

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

Naturally, Since I Myself Am A Writer, I Do Not Wish The Ordinary Reader To Read No Modern Books. But If He Must Read Only The New Or Only The Old, I Would Advise Him To Read The Old.

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

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

The Modern Habit Of Doing Ceremonial Things Unceremoniously Is No Proof Of Humility; Rather It Proves The Offender's Inability To Forget Himself In The Rite, And His Readiness To Spoil For Every One Else The Proper Pleasure Of Ritual.

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

No Christian And, Indeed, No Historian Could Accept The Epigram Which Defines Religion As 'what A Man Does With His Solitude.'

I Fancy That Most People Who Think At All Have Done A Great Deal Of Their Thinking In The First Fourteen Years.

Critics Who Treat Adult As A Term Of Approval, Instead Of As A Merely Descriptive Term, Cannot Be Adult Themselves. To Be Concerned About Being Grown Up, To Admire The Grown Up Because It Is Grown Up, To Blush At The Suspicion Of Being Childish; These Things Are The Marks Of Childhood And Adolescence.

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

Chronological Snobbery Is The Uncritical Acceptance Of The Intellectual Climate Common To Our Own Age And The Assumption That Whatever Has Gone Out Of Date Is On That Account Discredited. You Must Find Why It Went Out Of Date. Was It Ever Refuted (and If So By Whom, Where, And How Conclusively), Or Did It Merely Die Away As Fashions Do? If The Latter, This Tells Us Nothing About Its Truth Or Falsehood.

Lucy Looked And Saw That Aslan Had Just Breathed On The Feet Of The Stone Giant. It's All Right!" Shouted Aslan Joyously. "once The Feet Are Put Right, All The Rest Of Him Will Follow.

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

Emeth Speaking Of Aslan, "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...and Since Then, O Kings And Ladies, I Have Been Wandering To Find Him And My Happiness Is So Great That It Even Weakens Me Like A Wound. And This Is The Marvel Of Marvels, That He Called Me Beloved, Me Who Am But As A Dog

And In Truth (as I Now See) I Had The Wish To Put Off My Journey As Long As I Could. Not For Any Peril Or Labour It Might Cost; But Because I Could See Nothing In The Whole World For Me To Do Once It Was Accomplished. As Long As This Act Lay Before Me, There Was, As It Were, Some Barrier Between Me And The Dead Desert Which The Rest Of My Life Must Be.

Peter, High King Of Narnia," Said Aslan. "shut The Door.

Don't You Understand Anything? Isn't It Absolutely Essential To Keep A Fierce Left And A Fierce Right, Both On Their Toes And Each Terrified Of The Other? That's How We Get Things Done. Any Opposition To The N.i.c.e. Is Represented As A Left Racket In The Right Papers And A Right Racket In The Left Papers. If It's Properly Done, You Get Each Side Outbidding The Other In Support Of Us-to Refute The Enemy Slanders. Of Course We're Non-political. The Real Power Always Is.

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

In Any Fairly Large And Talkative Community Such As A University There Is Always The Danger That Those Who Think Alike Should Gravitate Together Where They Will Henceforth Encounter Opposition Only In The Emasculated Form Of Rumour That The Outsiders Say Thus And Thus. The Absent Are Easily Refuted, Complacent Dogmatism Thrives, And Differences Of Opinion Are Embittered By The Group Hostility. Each Group Hears Not The Best, But The Worst, That The Other Group Can Say.

Fallen Man Is Not Simply An Imperfect Creature Who Needs Improvement: He Is A Rebel Who Must Lay Down His Arms. Laying Down Your Arms, Surrendering, Saying You Are Sorry, Realizing That You Have Been On The Wrong Track And Getting Ready To Start Life Over Again From The Ground Floor-that Is The Only Way Out Of A "hole." This Process Of Surrender-this Movement Full Speed Astern-is Repentance.

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

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

To Be Ignorant And Simple Now-not To Be Able To Meet The Enemies On Their Own Ground-would Be To Throw Down Our Weapons And To Betray Our Uneducated Brethren Who Have, Under God, No Defense But Us Against The Intellectual Attacks Of The Heathen. Good Philosophy Must Exist, If For No Other Reason, Because Bad Philosophy Needs To Be Answered.

He Produced Mainly Three Results: Hatred, Terror, Adoration.

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

The Question About Progress Has Become The Question Whether We Can Discover Any Way Of Submitting To The Worldwide Paternalism Of A Technocracy Without Losing All Personal Privacy And Independence. Is There Any Possibility Of Getting The Super Welfare State's Honey And Avoiding The Sting?

I Was Not Born To Be Free---i Was Born To Adore And Obey.

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

Men Propound Mathematical Theorems In Besieged Cities, Conduct Metaphysical Arguments In Condemned Cells, Make Jokes On The Scaffold, Discuss A New Poem While Advancing To The Walls Of Quebec, And Comb Their Hair At Thermopylae. This Is Not Panache; It Is Our Nature.

It Is Better To Forget About Yourself Altogether.

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

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