I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
C. S. LewisRead
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that believing in objective values is essential for a fair system of rules and obedience that is not oppressive.
C. S. Lewis argues that for a set of rules to be legitimate and just, there must be an underlying belief in objective values. Without this belief, any system of rules may degenerate into tyranny, and obedience may resemble slavery, as the absence of objective morality can lead to arbitrary and oppressive systems of power.
In practice
This quote could be used in a philosophical debate about the foundations of morality.
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.
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
The castle of Cair Paravel on its little hill towered up above them; before them were the sands, with rocks and little pools of salt water, and seaweed, and the smell of the sea and long miles of bluish-green waves breaking for ever and ever on the beach. And oh, the cry of the seagulls! Have you ever heard it? Can you remember?
A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom- he fears a drunken poet who may crack a joke that will take hold.
Let's make two things clear: Isil is not "Islamic." No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of Isil's victims have been Muslim. And Isil is certainly not a state.
Things are so hard to figure out when you live from day to day in this feverish and silly world.
Man is more disposed to domination than freedom; and a structure of dominion not only gladdens the eye of the master who rears and protects it, but even its servants are uplifted by the thought that they are members of a whole, which rises high above the life and strength of single generations.
Because the European does not know his own unconscious, he does not understand the East and projects it into everything he fears and despises in himself.
If you give people nothingness, they can ponder what can be achieved from that nothingness.
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