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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“If we fail to forgive ourselves when God has done so, we make ourselves a higher judge than Him.”

CS Lewis  |  "Mere Christianity"

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“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do other things.’ I do not think that this is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.”

CS Lewis  |  "The Letters of C.S. Lewis"

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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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“As an organism, man is subjected to various biological laws which he cannot disobey any more than an animal can. That is, he cannot disobey the laws which he shares with other things. But the law which is particular to his human nature, the law he does now share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

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“All the human beings that history has heard of acknowledge some kind of morality; that is, they feel towards certain proposed actions the experiences expressed by the words ‘I ought’ or ‘I ought not’…Morality is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be ‘given’ in the facts of experience.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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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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“The Christian doctrine of suffering explains, I believe, a very curious fact about the world we live in. The settled happiness and security we all desire, God withholds from us by the very nature of the world; but joy, pleasure, and merriment, He has scattered broadcast. We are never safe, but we have plenty of fun, and some ecstasy.

“It is not hard to see why. The security we crave would teach us to rest our hearts in this world and oppose an obstacle in our return to God; a few moments of happy love, a landscape, a symphony, a merry meeting with our friends, a bathe or a football match, have no such tendency. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

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