“Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”
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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
“Golly,' said Edmund under his breath, 'He's a retired star.”
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C.S. Lewis
“He liked books if they were books of information and had pictures of grain elevators or of fat foreign children doing exercises in model schools.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If you think of this world as a place simply intended for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place for training and correction and it's not so bad.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
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C.S. Lewis
"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”
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C.S. Lewis
“She stepped out from among their shifting confusion of lovely lights and shadows. A circle of grass, smooth as a lawn, met her eyes, with dark trees dancing all around it. And then --Oh Joy! For he was there: the huge Lion, shining white in the moonlight, with his huge black shadow underneath him.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say. ”
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C.S. Lewis
“Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is.”
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C.S. Lewis
“[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.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I hope no one who reads this book has been quite as miserable as Susan and Lucy were that night; but if you have been - if you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you - you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing is ever going to happen again.”
―
C.S. Lewis
