“There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.”
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C.S. Lewis
“When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, "hullo! i'm growing up." It is only when he looks back that he realises what has happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up.”
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C.S. Lewis
“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?”
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C.S. Lewis
“No emotion is, in itself, a judgement; in that sense all emotions and sentiments are alogical. but they can be reasonable or unreasonable as they conform to Reason or fail to conform. The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Apparently, then, our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation. And to be at last summoned inside would be both glory and honour beyond all our merits and also the healing of that old ache.”
―
C.S. Lewis
“Be thou glad sleeper and thy sorrow offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure.”
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C.S. Lewis
“If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”
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C.S. Lewis
“A woman's heart should be so close to God that a man should have to chase Him to find her.”
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C.S. Lewis
“For the Present is the point at which time touches eternity.”
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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
“Pure, spiritual, intellectual love shot from their faces like barbed lightning. It was so unlike the love we experience that its expression could easily be mistaken for ferocity.”
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C.S. Lewis
“There might be things more terrible even than losing someone you love by death.”
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C.S. Lewis
“One of the drawbacks about adventures is that when you come to the most beautiful places you are often too anxious and hurried to appreciate them.”
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C.S. Lewis
“Look for the valleys, the green places, and fly through them. There will always be a way through.”
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C.S. Lewis
“I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. ...I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life -- namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.”
―
C.S. Lewis
