“The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.”
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C.S. Lewis
“For pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The world does not need more Christian literature. What it needs is more Christians writing good literature.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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!”
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C.S. Lewis
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?”
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C.S. Lewis
“Supposing you hear a cry for help from a man in danger. You will probably feel two desires - one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation). But you will find inside you, in addition to these two impulses, a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away. Now this thing that judges between two instincts, that decides which should be encouraged, cannot itself be either of them. You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.”
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C.S. Lewis
“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Almost certainly God is not in time. His life does not consist of moments one following another...Ten-thirty-- and every other moment from the beginning of the world--is always Present for Him. If you like to put it this way, He has all eternity in which to listen to the split second of prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.”
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C.S. Lewis
“We may ignore, but we can nowhere evade the presence of God. The world is crowded with Him. He walks everywhere incognito.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I could never have gone far in any science because on the path of every science the lion Mathematics lies in wait for you.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.”
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C.S. Lewis