CS Lewis

“Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think is trustworthy. 99% of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I cannot prove by abstract reasoning that there is such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the Solar System, atoms, evolution, and the coalition of blood on authority.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Can it really be my duty to buy and receive masses of junk every winter just to help the shopkeepers?”

CS Lewis  |  What Christmas Means to Me

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“Have ye received his image in your countenances?” “Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died two thousand years ago. It is a living Man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as He was when He created the world, really coming and interfering with your very self; killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self He has. At first, only for moments. Then for longer periods. Finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing; into . . . a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God; which shares His power, joy, knowledge and eternity.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“The relationship between Creator and creature is, of course, unique, and cannot be paralleled by any relations between one creature and another. God is both further from us, and nearer to us, than any other being…He makes, we are made; He is original, we derivative. But at the same time, and for some reason, the intimacy between God and even the meanest creature is closer than any that creatures can attain with one another.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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“Consequently, atheism turns out to be too simple. 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 a word without meaning.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“A proud man Is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“Pride is the complete anti-God state of mind. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say people are proud of being rich or clever or good looking, but they are not. They are proud being richer or cleverer or better looking than others.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“We use a most unfortunate idiom when we say, of a lustful man prowling the streets, that he ‘wants a woman.’ Strictly speaking, a woman is just what he does not want. He wants a pleasure for which a woman happens to be the necessary piece of apparatus. How much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition (one does not keep the carton after one has smoked the cigarettes).”

CS Lewis  |  The Four Loves

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“It is clear that this knowledge of his death must have somehow been withdrawn from him before he prayed in Gethsemane. He could not, with whatever reservation about the Father’s will, have prayed that the cup might pass and simultaneously known that it would not. That is both a logical and psychological impossibility. You see what this involves? Lest any trial incident to humanity should be lacking, the torments of hope – of suspense, anxiety- were at the last moment looser upon him – the supposed possibility that, after all, he might, he just conceivably might, be spared from the supreme horror. There was precedent. Isaac had hern spared; he too at the last moment, he also against all apparent possibility. But for this last (and erroneous) hope against hope, and the consequent tumult of the soul, the sweat of blood, perhaps he would not have been very man. To live in a fully predictable world is not to be man.”

CS Lewis

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