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We want to know not how we should pray if we were perfect but how we should pray being as we now are ... It is no use to ask God with factitious earnestness for A when our whole mind is in reality filled with the desire for B. We must lay before Him what is in us, not what ought to be in us.

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
Must
Filled
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Ought
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Perfect
Factitious
Desire
Earnestness
Use
Lays
Reality
Pray
Whole
Praying

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Here. All of you. And you, doorkeeper. No one is to be let out of the house today. And anyone I catch talking about this young lady will be first beaten to death and then burned alive and after that be kept on bread and water for six weeks. There.
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If you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way.
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Without sin, the universe is a Solemn Game: and there is no good game without rules.
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The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power
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If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake.
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When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
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No good work is done anywhere without aid from the Father of Lights.
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But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.
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The demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy (on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy: that theirs should be the final power that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.
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Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
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We are not meant to be perpetually solemn: We must play.
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One of the most cowardly things ordinary people do is to shut their eyes to facts.
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A tyrannous and gluttonous demand for affection can be a horrible thing. But in ordinary life no one calls a child selfish because it turns for comfort to its mother nor an adult who turns to his fellow for company. Those, whether children or adults, who do so least are not usually the most selfless.
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If you live for the next world, you get this one in the deal but if you live only for this world, you lose them both.
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But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.
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Badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. Evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
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The best fruits are plucked for each by some hand that is not his own.
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Selfishness has never been admired.
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I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.
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Though no one would want to be sold as a slave, it is perhaps even more galling to be a sort of utility slave whom no one will buy.
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