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The road to the promised land runs past Sinai. The moral law may exist to be transcended: but there is no transcending it for those who have not first admitted its claims up on them, and then tried with all their strength to meet that claim, and fairly and squarely faced the fact of their failure.

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
Autobiographer
Broadcaster
Essayist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Literary Historian
Literary Scholar
Medievalist
Novelist
Belfast
Ireland
Clive Hamilton
N. W. Clerk
CS Lewis
Clive Staples Lewis
C.S. Lewis
First
Law
Claims
Sinai
Moral
Road
Transcending
Fact
Tried
Admitted
Running
Exist
Promised
Facts
Meet
Faced
Past
Failure
Fairly
May
Strength
Runs
Transcended
Firsts
Land
Claim
Squarely

More quotes by C. S. Lewis

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Every poet and musician and artist, but for grace>Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
C. S. Lewis
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Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.
C. S. Lewis
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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
C. S. Lewis
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Of course language is not an infallible guide, but it contains, with all its defects, a good deal of stored insight and experience.
C. S. Lewis
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To every soul, God will look like its first love because He IS its first love. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it - made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.
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Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see.
C. S. Lewis
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Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
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If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.
C. S. Lewis
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The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.
C. S. Lewis
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If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.
C. S. Lewis
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God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.
C. S. Lewis
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There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he has read them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?
C. S. Lewis
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As for all I can tell, the only difference is that what many see we call a real thing, and what only one sees we call a dream.
C. S. Lewis
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Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.
C. S. Lewis
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this is a book about something
C. S. Lewis
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God knows our situation He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them.
C. S. Lewis
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Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity.
C. S. Lewis
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There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditures excludes them.
C. S. Lewis
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Humour is...the all-consoling and...the all-excusing, grace of life.
C. S. Lewis
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I haven't any language weak enough to depict the weakness of my spiritual life. If I weakened it enough it would cease to be language at all. As when you try to turn the gas-ring a little lower still, and it merely goes out.
C. S. Lewis