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My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

C. S. Lewis

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C. S. Lewis
Age: 64 †
Born: 1898
Born: January 1
Died: 1963
Died: January 1
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Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.
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But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.
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There seems to be hardly any one among my acquaintance from whom I have not learned.
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Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.
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We who have been true readers all our life fully realize the enormous of our being which we owe to authors.
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until the theologians and the ordained clergy begin to communicate with ordinary people in the vernacular, in a way that they can understand, I’m going to have to do this sort of thing.
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Not that I am (I think) in much danger of ceasing to believe in God. The real danger is of coming to believe such dreadful things about Him. The conclusion I dread is not 'So there's no God after all,' but 'So this is what God's really like. Deceive yourself no longer.
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The more we get what we now call 'ourselves' out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
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and the whole forest would give itself up to jollification for weeks on end.
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I can promise you none of these things. No sphere of usefulness you are not needed there at all. No scope of your talents only forgiveness for having perverted them. No atmosphere of inquiry, for I will bring you to the land not of questions but of answers, and you shall see the face of God. (pg 40)
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Nothing less will shake a man — or at any rate a man like me — out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it himself.
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We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
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To be religious is to have one's attention fixed on God and on one's neighbour in relation to God.
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God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.
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...if all we mean by our love is a craving to be loved, we are in a very deplorable state.
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God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all.
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For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
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Of course all children's literature is not fantastic, so all fantastic books need not be children's books. It is still possible, even in an age so ferociously anti-romantic as our own, to write fantastic stories for adults: though you will usually need to have made a name in some more fashionable kind of literature before anyone will publish them.
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The proper aim of giving is to put the recipient in a state where he no longer needs our gift.
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Joy bursts in our lives when we go about doing the good at hand and not trying to manipulate things and times to achieve joy.
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