Life’s work is to wake up, to let the things that enter into the circle wake you up rather than put you to sleep. The only way to do this is to open, be curious, and develop some sense of sympathy for everything that comes along, to get to know its nature and let it teach you what it will.
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QUOTE
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
C. S. Lewis (1898–1963) was a British fellow and tutor at Oxford University, chair of Medieval and Renaissance literature at Cambridge University, and prolific author best known for his work on Christian apologetics and exploration of moral philosophy through fairy tales, science fiction, and the children’s series The Chronicles of Narnia.
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What we call ‘mastery’ can be defined as that mysterious process through which what is at first difficult or even impossible becomes easy and pleasurable through diligent, patient, long-term practice.
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Resolve to do the things you find to be difficult. That’s what confident people do. They tackle those things that are scary and they get addicted to doing it.
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Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
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I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
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There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
No matter how simplified or complicated life gets, it can make us miserable or it can wake us up.
Stay a verb—don’t become a noun.
If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself. If you want to eliminate the suffering in the world, then eliminate all that is dark and negative in yourself. Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation.
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