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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.

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
Self
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Loveless
Heaven
Demand
Blackmail
Happy
Terms
Veto
Universe
Taste
Imprisoned
Inspirational
Joy
Consent
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Hell
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Till

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Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
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Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?
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Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
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The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred
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When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
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Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.
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You can't go against the grain of the universe and not expect to get splinters.
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Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations.
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I have come, said a deep voice behind them. They turned and saw the Lion himself, so bright and real and strong that everything else began at once to look pale and shadowy compared with him.
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We ought to give thanks for all fortune: if it is good, because it is good if bad, because it works in us patience, humility, contempt of this world and the hope of our eternal country.
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We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
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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.
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Your book bill ought to be your biggest extravagance.
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The sane would do no good if they made themselves mad to help madmen.
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All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.
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What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
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Laziness means more work in the long run.
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A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.
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If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
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The worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.
C. S. Lewis