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The modern habit of doing ceremonial things unceremoniously is no proof of humility rather it proves the offender's inability to forget himself in the rite, and his readiness to spoil for every one else the proper pleasure of ritual.

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
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Every
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Rite
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Habit
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Spoil
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Inability
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Ritual
Ceremonial

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Repentance is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose it is simply a description of what going back is like.
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Love, having become a god, becomes a demon.
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You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve, said Aslan. And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content.
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All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl! Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.
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But no one except Lucy knew that as it circled the mast it had whispered to her, Courage, dear heart, and the voice, she felt sure, was Aslan's, and with the voice a delicious smell breathed in her face.
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The story does what no theorem can quite do. It may not be like real life in the superficial sense: but it sets before us an image of what reality may well be like at some more central region.
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All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be. This is elementary
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At a well in a yard they met a man who was beating a boy. The stick burst into a flower in the mans hand. He tried to drop it, but it stuck to his hand. His arm became a branch, his body the trunk of a tree, his feet took root.
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For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?
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And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to do another and harder and better one.
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Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body-different from one another and each contributing what no other could.
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We are...a Divine work of art, something that God is making...something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.
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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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The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.
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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?
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Hatred obscures all distinctions.
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One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
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I was wondering — I mean — could there be some mistake? Because nobody called me and Scrubb, you know. It was we who asked to come here. You would not have called me unless I had been calling you.
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You can't know, you can only believe - or not.
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