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C.S. Lewis

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It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
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XXX
Topic: Religion
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.
From The Joyful Christian
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Topic: Religion
When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.
From A Grief Observed
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XXX
Topic: Religion
Man 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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XXX
Topic: Religion
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
From A Grief Observed
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XXX
Topic: Religion
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
From The Great Divorce
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XXX
Topic: Religion
The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.
From Till We Have Faces
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XXX
Topic: Religion
She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
From The Screwtape Letters
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XXX
Topic: Funny
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
From The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress, Christian Reflections, God in the Dock
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XXX
Topic: Life
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
From A Grief Observed
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XXX
Topic: Death
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
From The Magician’s Nephew
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XXX
Topic: Inspirational
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
From The Great Divorce
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XXX
Topic: Religion
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.
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XXX
Topic: Religion
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. 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.
From The Great Divorce
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XXX
Topic: Religion
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
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XXX
Topic: Religion
But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.
From Prince Caspian
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XXX
Topic: Motivational
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.
From The Four Loves
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XXX
Topic: Hope
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
From The Problem of Pain
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XXX
Topic: Life
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
From A Grief Observed
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XXX
Topic: Death
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?
From A Grief Observed
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XXX
Topic: Death
Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.
From Suprised by Joy
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XXX
Topic: Education
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.
From The Joyful Christian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
Man 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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
From The Great Divorce
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.
From Till We Have Faces
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
From The Screwtape Letters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Funny
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
From The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress, Christian Reflections, God in the Dock
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
From The Magician’s Nephew
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Inspirational
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
From The Great Divorce
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. 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.
From The Great Divorce
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.
From Prince Caspian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Motivational
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.
From The Four Loves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Hope
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
From The Problem of Pain
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.
From Suprised by Joy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Education
It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
Aim at Heaven and you will get Earth 'thrown in': aim at Earth and you will get neither.
From The Joyful Christian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
When you are happy, so happy you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be — or so it feels— welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
Man 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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
From The Great Divorce
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
The gods, not out of mercy, have made me strong.
From Till We Have Faces
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.
From The Screwtape Letters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Funny
The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own,' or 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one's real life -- the life God is sending one day by day.
From The Collected Works of C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress, Christian Reflections, God in the Dock
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
The grave and the image are equally links with the irrecoverable and symbols for the unimaginable.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
No great wisdom can be reached without sacrifice.
From The Magician’s Nephew
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Inspirational
Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.
From The Great Divorce
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
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.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road. A sum can be put right: but only by going back til you find the error and working it afresh from that point, never by simply going on. 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.
From The Great Divorce
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient's reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result?
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Religion
But when your sword breaks, you draw your dagger.
From Prince Caspian
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Motivational
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.
From The Four Loves
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Hope
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
From The Problem of Pain
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Life
Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can't avoid. I mean my own body. It had such a different importance while it was the body of H.'s lover. Now it's like an empty house.
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
They say, 'The coward dies many times'; so does the beloved. Didn't the eagle find a fresh liver to tear in Prometheus every time it dined?
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back -- to be sucked back -- into it?
From A Grief Observed
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Death
Even in peacetime I think those are very wrong who say that schoolboys should be encouraged to read the newspapers. Nearly all that a boy reads there in his teens will be known before he is twenty to have been false in emphasis and interpretation, if not in fact as well, and most of it will have lost all importance. Most of what he remembers he will therefore have to unlearn; and he will probably have acquired an incurable taste for vulgarity and sensationalism and the fatal habit of fluttering from paragraph to paragraph to learn how an actress has been divorced in California, a train derailed in France, and quadruplets born in New Zealand.
From Suprised by Joy
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
XXX
Topic: Education
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