“For jokes as well as justice come in with speech.
- Aslan, The Magician's Nephew”
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C.S. Lewis
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket – safe, dark, motionless, airless – it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
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C.S. Lewis
“For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”
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C.S. Lewis
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you find out the strength of the German army by fighting against it, not by giving in. You find out the strength of a wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down. A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness — they have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means — the only complete realist.”
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C.S. Lewis
“But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.”
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C.S. Lewis
“God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than He is of any other slacker.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”
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C.S. Lewis
“We must lay before him what is in us; not what ought to be in us.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Do not cite the Deep Magic to me, Witch. I was there when it was written.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The best swordsman in the world may be disarmed by a trick that's new to him.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Dearest Daughter. I knew you would not be long in coming to me. Joy shall be yours.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Certainly, Lu. Whatever you like,' said Peter unexpectedly. This was encouraging, but as Peter instantly rolled round and went to sleep again it wasn't much use.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I thought ... that I was carried in the will of Him I love, but now I see that I walk with it. I thought that the good things He sent drew me into them as the waves lift the islands; but now I see that it is I who plunge into them with my own legs and arms, as when we go swimming. I feel as if I were living in that roofless world of [Earth] where men walk undefended beneath naked heaven. It is a delight with terror in it! One's own self to be walking from one good to another, walking beside Him as Himself may walk, not even holding hands. How has He made me so separate from Himself? How did it enter His mind to conceive such a thing? The world is so much larger than I thought. I thought we went along paths--but it seems there are no paths. The going itself is the path.”
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C.S. Lewis
“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”
―
C.S. Lewis
