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The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe.

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
Universe
Petted
Natural
Centred
Lives
Exploit
Self
Exploits
Take
Admired
Whole
Advantage
Something
Life
Wants

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I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
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Even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam--he is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
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And as Jill gazed at its motionless bulk, she realized that she might as well have asked the whole mountain to move aside for her convenience.
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Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be vulgarity - like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.
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Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
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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.
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Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask - half our great theological and metaphysical problems - are like that.
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A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
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And all the time - such is the tragic comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
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I cannot understand how a man can appear in print claiming to disbelieve everything that he presupposes when he puts on the surplice. I feel it is a form of prostitution.
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Seek Unity and you will find neither Unity nor Truth.Seek the light of truth, and you will find Unity and Truth.
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Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done.
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Everything except God has some natural superior everything except unformed matter has some natural inferior.
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The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one's life.
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But probably every age gets, within certain limits, the science it deserves.
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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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I think we must attack -- wherever we meet it -- the nonsensical idea that mutually exclusive propositions about God can both be true.
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When we want to be something other than the thing that God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy...whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.
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It is in some ways more troublesome to track and swat an evasive wasp than to shoot, at close range, a wild elephant. But the elephant is more troublesome if you miss.
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Emerson said, Do you love me? means Do you see the same truth?-Or at least, Do you care about the same truth?
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