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DURHAM, N.C. (AP) Mason Plumlee scored a career-high 28 points, and No. 9 Duke routed Florida Gulf Coast 88-67 on Sunday night for its school-record 96th straight nonconference win at home.
Freshman Rasheed Sulaimon added 19 points and Ryan Kelly had 14 points for the Blue Devils (3-0).
They scored 30 straight points - including a 23-0 run to close the first half - to brush off a slow start, and forced 25 turnovers to cruise in this preliminary on-campus matchup in the Battle 4 Atlantis tournament.
Bernard Thompson scored a career-high 24 points for Florida Gulf Coast (2-2), which led for most of the first half.
But foul trouble, sloppy ball-handling and cold shooting during the last 5 1/2 minutes of the half ruined the Eagles' chances at their first win over a Top 25 team and second victory in six days against an Atlantic Coast Conference program.
Sherwood Brown added 12 points for Florida Gulf Coast, which finished with more turnovers than field goals (23) and never got closer than 19 in the second half.
Plumlee surpassed his previous best of 25 points set as a sophomore against Marquette in 2010. He's a 51 percent free-throw shooter, but he was 10 of 11 from the foul line - by far his best night from the stripe when he's gone there at least 10 times.
Seth Curry added 10 points for the Blue Devils, who were playing five days after beating No. 3 Kentucky in Atlanta and four days before taking on Minnesota in the Bahamas. They overcame 18 turnovers by turning the Eagles' miscues into 36 points.
They haven't lost a nonconference game at Cameron Indoor Stadium since 2000, and surpassed their previous mark of 95 straight non-ACC wins here, set from 1983-95.
Yet for a while, this latest streak sure looked like it was in jeopardy.
The Eagles, who beat Miami by 12 on Nov. 13, led for much of the way early behind some sharp 3-point shooting. Florida Gulf Coast hit 6 of its first 12 from beyond the arc and took a 30-29 lead on Filip Cvjeticanin's 3 with 5 1/2 minutes before the break.
That's when Duke finally got rolling. Guard Quinn Cook, who made his first start of the season, hit his second straight 3 a few seconds later to put the Blue Devils ahead to stay and start the overwhelming run.
Kelly scored seven points during the burst while Cook ended it with a jumper with about 7 seconds left to make it 52-30.
The Blue Devils then scored the first seven points of the second half, going up 59-30 on Plumlee's free throw with 18:34 left.


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Clive Staples Lewis (November 29 1898 – November 22 1963) was an Irish author, scholar of medieval literature, and Christian apologist. He is best known for his essays on Christianity and for the children's fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia.
Born: November 29th, 1898
Died: November 22nd, 1963
Categories: Christian apologists, Theologians, Irish authors, Academics, 1960s deaths, Fantasy authors, Science fiction authors
Quotes: 228 sourced quotes total (includes 5 misattributed, 4 about)
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You are never too old to set another goal, or to dream a new dream.
"And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes."
Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.
"Ah, Psyche," I said, "have I made you so little happy as that?"
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
"They would say," he answered, "that you do not fail in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience."
Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Friendship arises out of mere companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
"'Are the gods not just?' 'Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?'"
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one — the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
If we cannot "practice the presence of God," it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep. Bur for news of the fully waking world you must go to my betters.
"And yet, it was not, not now, she that really counted. Or if she counted (and, oh, gloriously she did) it was for another's sake. The earth and stars and sun, all that was or will be, existed for his sake. And he was coming. The most dreadful, the most beautiful, the only dread and beauty there is, was coming. The pillars on the far side of the pool flushed with his approach. I cast down my eyes."
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
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.
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
Humans are amphibians — half spirit and half animal.... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.
Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.
The doctrine of the Second Coming has failed, so far as we are concerned, if it does not make us realize that at every moment of every year in our lives Donne's question "What if this present were the world's last night?" is equally relevant.
The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
You don't have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
It is hard to have patience with people who say 'There is no death' or 'Death doesn't matter.' There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of "Admin." The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the offices of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
It is Christ Himself, not the Bible, who is the true Word of God. The Bible, read in the right spirit and with the guidance of good teachers, will bring us to Him.
Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending to do our Enemy's will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.
All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires, not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.
All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
"Then those people are right who say that Heaven and Hell are only states of mind?" "Hush," he said sternly. "Do not blaspheme. Hell is a state of mind — ye never said a truer word. And every state of mind, left to itself, every shutting up of the creature within the dungeon of its own mind — is, in the end, Hell. But Heaven is not a state of mind. Heaven is reality itself. All that is fully real is Heavenly."
' But what of the poor Ghosts who never get into the omnibus at all?' 'Everyone who wishes it does. Never fear. There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell . No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.'
Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
Though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time.
The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape?
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies — those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
You can't get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.
The very man who has argued you down will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said.
Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently He thought it worth the risk.
I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
The Value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.
Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger—according to the way you react to it.
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of 'No answer.' It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, 'Peace, child; you don't understand.'
When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.
You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), 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—like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".
Reality is harsh to the feet of shadows.
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
If there is equality, it is in His love, not in us.
I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
This is where dreams—dreams, do you understand—come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.
The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.
Enough had been thought, and said, and felt, and imagined. It was about time that something should be done.
I am not asking anyone to accept Christianity if his best reasoning tells him that the weight of the evidence is against it.
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard.
There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men.
The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like going, but like going back.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
Who believes in Aslan nowadays?
Every story of conversion is the story of a blessed defeat.
100 per cent of us die, and the percentage cannot be increased.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
It is the stupidest children who are most childish and the stupidest grown-ups who are most grown-up.
We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
"I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment..."
For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.
"Milton was right…" The choice of every lost soul can be expressed in the words "Better to reign in Hell than to serve in Heaven." There is always something they insist on keeping even at the price of misery…
A sensible human once said, "If people knew how much ill-feeling unselfishness occasions, it would not be so often recommended from the pulpit"; and again, "She's the sort of woman who lives for others—you can always tell the others by their hunted expression."
The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not "influence" as it is ordinarily understood, but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my "stuff" could be more than a private hobby.
There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man. We do not merely observe men, we are men. In this case we have, so to speak, inside information; we are in the know.
If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next... It is since Christians have largely ceased to think of the other world that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at Heaven and you will get earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get neither.
"Say what you like," we shall be told, "the apocalyptic beliefs of the first Christians have been proved to be false. It is clear from the New Testament that they all expected the Second Coming in their own lifetime. And, worse still, they had a reason, and one which you will find very embarrassing. Their Master had told them so. He shared, and indeed created, their delusion. He said in so many words, 'this generation shall not pass till all these things be done.' And he was wrong. He clearly knew no more about the end of the world than anyone else." It is certainly the most embarrassing verse in the Bible.
Nothing is yet in its true form.
I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.
Die before you Die. There is no chance after.
Mr. Lewis possesses the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.
A children's story which is enjoyed only by children is a bad children's story.
I have always — at least, ever since I can remember — had a kind of longing for death."
Only the skilled can judge the skilfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
As long as this deliberate refusal to understand things from above, even where such understanding is possible, continues, it is idle to talk of any final victory over materialism.
Mr. Sensible learned only catchwords from them. He could talk like Epicurus of spare diet, but he was a glutton. He had from Montaigne the language of friendship, but no friend.
We are born helpless. As soon as we are fully conscious we discover loneliness. We need others physically, emotionally, intellectually; we need them if we are to know anything, even ourselves.
I wrote the books I should have liked to read. That's always been my reason for writing. People won't write the books I want, so I have to do it for myself.
So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age—like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.
If anything extraordinary seems to have happened, we can always say that we have been the victims of an illusion. If we hold a philosophy which excludes the supernatural, this is what we always shall say.
Is anything more certain than that in all those vast times and spaces, if I were allowed to search them, I should nowhere find her face, her voice, her touch? She died. She is dead. Is the word so difficult to learn?
Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells to love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. How many hours are there in a mile? Is yellow square or round? Probably half the questions we ask — half our great theological and metaphysical problems — are like that.
But how can the characters in a play guess the plot? We are not the playwright, we are not the producer, we are not even the audience. We are on the stage. To play well the scenes in which we are "on" concerns us much more than to guess about the scenes that follow it.
There have been men before … who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God himself… as if the good Lord had nothing to do but to exist. There have been some who were so preoccupied with spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ.
My dear Wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.
"The cardinal difficulty," said MacPhee, "in collaboration between the sexes is that women speak a language without nouns. If two men are doing a bit of work, one will say to the other, 'Put this bowl inside the bigger bowl which you'll find on the top shelf of the green cupboard.' The female for this is, 'Put that in the other one in there.' And then if you ask them, 'in where?' they say, 'in there, of course.' There is consequently a phatic hiatus."
The man is a humbug — a vulgar, shallow, self-satisfied mind, absolutely inaccessible to the complexities and delicacies of the real world. He has the journalist's air of being a specialist in everything, of taking in all points of view and being always on the side of the angels: he merely annoys a reader who has the least experience of knowing things, of what knowing is like. There is not two pence worth of real thought or real nobility in him. But he isn't dull…
Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: "We give thanks to thee for thy great glory." Need-love says of a woman "I cannot live without her"; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection — if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.
"No, no no," she said. "You don't understand. Not that kind of longing. It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine … where you couldn't see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn't (not yet) come and I didn't know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home.
Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, "Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words." A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?
There are two parodies of the truth which different sets of Christians have, in the past, been accused by other Christians of believing: perhaps they may make the truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, "Good actions are all that matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over ₤10,000 and we will see you through." The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, done with the idea that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end." The answers to that nonsense is that, if what you call your "faith" in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what he says, then it is not Faith at all—not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory of Him.
Not my idea of God, but God.
The devil...the prowde spirit...cannot endure to be mocked.
The only people who object to escapism are jailers.
I became my own only when I gave myself to Another.
The humans live in time but our Enemy (God) destines them for eternity.
We reduce things to mere Nature in order that we may 'conquer' them.
'Who are you? Nobody. Who is Porridge? THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON THERE IS.'
Their own strength has betrayed them. They have...pulled down Deep Heaven on their heads.
Legal and economic equality are absolutely necessary remedies for the Fall, and protection against cruelty.'''
I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.
But supposing one tries to live by Pantheistic philosophy? Does it lead to a complacent Hegelian optimism?
Our father was married twice,' continued Humanist. 'Once to a lady named Epichaerecacia, and afterwards to Euphuia...
Courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years into domestic hatred.
As image and apprehension are in organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.
'Try now to answer my third riddle. By what rule to you tell a copy from an original?'
John-I'm trying to find the Island in the West. Sensible – You refer, no doubt to some aesthetic experience.
If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed.
He begins to think for himself and meets Nineteenth-century Rationalism Which can explain away religion by any number of methods .
My form remains one, though the matter in it changes continually. I am, in that respect, like a curve in a waterfall.
I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason.
I fancy that most people who think at all have done a great deal of their thinking in the first fourteen years.
I am to talk about apologetics. Apologetics means of course defense. The first question is—what do you propose to defend? Christianity, of course...
Even atheists rebel and express, like Hardy and Housman, their rage against God although (or because) He does not, on their view, exist...
If you make the same guess often enough it ceases to be a guess and becomes a Scientific Fact. This is the inductive method.
Savage-There is only one way fit for a man – Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.
The wraith of Sigmund said. "You know what this is, I suppose. Religious melancholia. Stop while there is time. If you dive, you dive into insanity."
A great myth is relevant as long as the predicament of humanity lasts; as long as humanity lasts. It will always work, on those who can receive it, the same catharsis.
I hope, said the third, that your wanderings in lonely places do not mean that you have any of the romantic virus still in your blood. His name was Mr. Humanist.
The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
'God' said the Ghost, glancing around the landscape. 'God what?' asked the Spirit. 'What do you mean, "God what"?' asked the Ghost. 'In our grammar God is a noun' said the Spirit.
Now, to-day, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.
I am sorry that my convictions do not allow me to repeat my friend's offer, said one of the others. But I have had to abandon the humanitarian and egalitarian fancies. His name was Mr. Neo-Classical.
The standard of permanent Christianity must be kept clear in our minds and it is against that standard that we must test all contemporary thought. In fact, we must at all costs not move with the times.
Frantic administration of panaceas to the world is certainly discouraged by the reflection that "this present" might be "the world's last night"; sober work for the future, within the limits of ordinary morality and prudence, is not.
The doctrine of the Second Coming teaches us that we do not and cannot know when the world drama will end. The curtain may be rung down at any moment: say, before you have finished reading this paragraph.
He came in sight of a pass guarded by armed men. 'you cannot pass … Do you not know that all this country belongs to the Spirit of the Age? … Here Enlightenment, take this fugitive to our Master.'
I have at last come to the end of the Faerie Queene: and though I say "at last", I almost wish he had lived to write six books more as he had hoped to do — so much have I enjoyed it.
A strict allegory is like a puzzle with a solution: a great romance is like a flower whose smell reminds you of something you can't quite place. I think the something is 'the whole quality of life as we actually experience it.'
Mr. Neo-Angular – I am doing my duty. My ethics are based on dogma, not on feeling. Vertue-I know that a rule is to be obeyed because it is a rule and not because it appeals to my feelings at the moment.
But then again of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.
Looking for God—or Heaven—by exploring space is like reading or seeing all Shakespeare's plays in the hope that you will find Shakespeare as one of the characters or Stratford as one of the places. Shakespeare is in one sense present at every moment in every play.
'you must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.' 'Some that thought that all these loves were copies of our love for the landlord.'
It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'
Then he tried to recall the lessons of Mr. Wisdom. "it is I myself, eternal Spirit, who drives this Me, the slave, along that ledge. I ought not to care whether he falls and breaks his neck or not. It is not he that is real, it is I – I – I.
Christian Apocalyptic offers us no such hope. It does not even foretell, (which would be more tolerable to our habits of thought) a gradual decay. It foretells a sudden, violent end imposed from without; an extinguisher popped onto the candle, a brick flung at the gramophone, a curtain rung down on the play — "Halt!"
What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
I want to have her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do all over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn't Lazarus the rawer deal?
The only non-Christians who seemed to me really to know anything were the Romantics; and a good many of them were dangerously tinged with something like religion, even at times with Christianity. The upshot of it all could nearly be expressed in a perversion of Roland's great line in the Chanson: 'Christians are wrong, but all the rest are bores.'
Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.
I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their own way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least. "Reflect" is the important word. This lower life of the imagination is not a beginning of, nor a step toward, the higher life of the spirit, merely an image.
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of the morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.
… in such a matter he would never have been guided by his first thoughts (which would probably have been right) nor even by his twenty-first (which would have at least been explicable). Beyond doubt he would have prolonged deliberation till his hundred-and-first; and they would be infallibly and invincibly wrong. This is what always happens to the deliberations of a simple man who thinks he is a subtle one.
Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It's not local at all. I suppose if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn't notice it much more in any one food more than another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.
[Mortals] say of some temporal suffering, "No future bliss can make up for it," not knowing Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say "Let me have but this and I'll take the consequences": little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin. Both processes begin even before death.
What can you ever really know of other people's souls—of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know and this is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.
When He died in the Wounded World He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less. Each thing, from the single grain of Dust to the strongest eldil, is the end and the final cause of all creation and the mirror in which the beam of His brightness comes to rest and so returns to Him. Blessed be He!
The Guide sang: The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought, And fools crying, Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun! The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run Faster for ever, The old age is done, We have new lights and see without the sun. (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea, Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)
God lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things — praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts — not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They might break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
'It comes, it comes!' they sang. 'Sleepers awake! It comes, it comes, it comes.' One dreadful glance over my shoulder I essayed — not long enough to see (or did I see?) the rim of the sunrise that shoots Time dead with golden arrows and puts to flight all phantasmal shapes. Screaming, I buried my face in the fold of the Teacher's robe. 'The morning! The morning!' I cried. 'I am caught by the morning and I am a ghost.'
For what comes is Judgment: happy are those whom it finds labouring in their vocations, whether they were merely going out to feed the pigs or laying good plans to deliver humanity a hundred years hence from some great evil. The curtain has indeed now fallen. Those pigs will never in fact be fed, the great campaign against White Slavery or Governmental Tyranny will never in fact proceed to victory. No matter; you were at your post when the Inspection came.
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose that you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it? … Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.
Wisdom: The first error is that of the southern people, and it consists in holding that these eastern and western places are real places. … give no quarter to that thought, whether it threatens you with fear, or tempts you with hopes. For this is Superstition and all who believe it will come in the end to the swamps to the south and the jungles to the far south. Part of the same error is to think that the Landlord is a real man:
I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost, much less a nation. Nor do most people — all the people who believe advertisements, and think in catchwords and spread rumors. The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
This is the terrible fix we are in. If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again....God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
If you are tired of the real landscape, look at it in a mirror. By putting bread, gold, horse, apple, or the very roads into a myth, we do not retreat from reality: we rediscover it. As long as the story lingers in our mind, the real things are more themselves. This book applies the treatment not only to bread or apple but to good and evil, to our endless perils, our anguish, and our joys. By dipping them in myth we see them more clearly.
We are told that Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed out our sins, and that by dying He has disabled death itself. That is the formula. That is Christianity. That is what has to be believed. Any theories we build up as to how Christ's death did all this are, in my view, quite secondary: mere plans or diagrams to be left alone if they do not help us, and, if they do help us, not to be confused with the thing itself.
And all the time — such is the tragi-comedy of our situation — we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more "drive", or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or "creativity". In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping. If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had.
I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations, to be all ineffaceably real, an essential part, his part, in the drama that has just ended: while the future Utopia had never been anything but a fantasy.
Every intrusion of the spirit that says, "I'm as good as you" into our personal and spiritual life is to be resisted just as jealously as every intrusion of bureaucracy or privilege into our politics. Hierarchy within can alone preserve egalitarianism without. Romantic attacks on democracy will come again. We shall never be safe unless we already understand in our hearts all that the anti-democrats can say, and have provided for it better than they. Human nature will not permanently endure flat equality if it is extended from its proper political field into the more real, more concrete fields within. Let us wear equality; but let us undress every night.
Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling... Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go... But, of course, ceasing to be "in love" need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from "being in love"—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God... "Being in love" first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
We Britons should rejoice that we have contrived to reach much legal democracy (we still need more of the economic) without losing our ceremonial Monarchy. For there, right in the midst of our lives, is that which satisfies the craving for inequality, and acts as a permanent reminder that medicine is not food. Hence a man's reaction to Monarchy is a kind of test. Monarchy can easily be "debunked", but watch the faces, mark well the accents of the debunkers. These are the men whose taproot in Eden has been cut — whom no rumor of the polyphony, the dance, can reach – men to whom pebbles laid in a row are more beautiful than an arch. Yet even if they desire mere equality they cannot reach it. Where men are forbidden to honor a king they honor millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead — even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served — deny it food and it will gobble poison.
God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love.
Not till then did his controllers allow him to suspect that death itself might not after all cure the illusion of being a soul—nay, might prove the entry into a world where that illusion raged infinite and unchecked. Escape for the soul, if not for the body, was offered him. He became able to know (and simultaneously refused the knowledge) that he had been wrong from the beginning, that souls and personal responsibility existed. He half saw: he wholly hated. The physical torture of the burning was not fiercer than his hatred of that.
You know C. S. Lewis, whom I greatly admire, said there's no such thing as creative writing. I've always agreed with that and always refuse to teach it when given the opportunity. He said there is, in fact, only one Creator and we mix. That's our function, to mix the elements He has given us. See how wonderfully anonymous that leaves us? You can't say, "I did this; this gross matrix of flesh and blood and sinews and nerves did this." '''What nonsense! I'm given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me.
[Christians] believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else. And that, by the way, is perhaps the most important difference between Christianity and all other religions: that in Christianity God is not an impersonal thing nor a static thing—not even just one person—but a dynamic pulsating activity, a life, a kind of drama, almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance … (The) pattern of this three-personal life is … the great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.
And then one babbles — 'if only I could bear it, or the worst of it, or any of it, instead of her.' But one can't tell how serious that bid is, for nothing is staked on it. If it suddenly became a real possibility, then, for the first time, we should discover how seriously we had meant it. But is it ever allowed? It was allowed to One, we are told, and I find I can now believe again, that He has done vicariously whatever can be done. '''He replies to our babble, 'you cannot and dare not. I could and dared.''''
There is no spiritual sustenance in flat equality. It is a dim recognition of this fact which makes much of our political propaganda sound so thin. We are trying to be enraptured by something which is merely the negative condition of the good life. That is why the imagination of people is so easily captured by appeals to the craving for inequality, whether in a romantic form of films about loyal courtiers or in the brutal form of Nazi ideology. The tempter always works on some real weakness in our own system of values — offers food to some need which we have starved.
The Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God if there is one; or—if they think there is not—at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. But the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.
The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronising and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
But perhaps I lack the gift. I see I've described her as being like a sword. That's true as far as it goes. But utterly inadequate by itself, and misleading. I ought to have said 'But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you explore.' And then, of her, and every created thing I praise, I should say 'in some way, in its unique way, like Him who made it.' Thus up from the garden to the Gardener, from the sword to the Smith. to the life-giving Life and the Beauty that makes beautiful.
The chief pleasure of his life in these days was to go down the road and look through the window in the wall in the hope of seeing the beautiful Island. … the sight of the Island and the sounds became very rare … and the yearning for the sight … became so terrible that John thought he would die if he did not have them again soon. … it came into his head that he might perhaps get the old feeling-for what, he thought, had the Island ever given him but a feeling?-by imagining. He shut his eyes and set his teeth again and made a picture of the Island in his mind.
'The Spirit of the Age wishes to allow argument and not to allow argument. … If anyone argues with them they say that he is rationalizing his own desires, and therefore need not be answered. But if anyone listens to them they will then argue themselves to show that their own doctrines are true. … You must ask them whether any reasoning is valid or not. If they say no, then their own doctrines, being reached by reasoning, fall to the ground. If they say yes, then they will have to examine your arguments and refute them on their merits: for if some reasoning is valid, for all they know, your bit of reasoning may be one of the valid bits.'
The Guide sang: Nearly they stood who fall; Themselves as they look back See always in the track The one false step, where all Even yet, by lightest swerve Of foot not yet enslaved, By smallest tremor of the smallest nerve, Might have been saved. Nearly they fell who stand, And with cold after fear Look back to mark how near They grazed the Siren's land, Wondering that subtle fate, By threads so spidery fine, The choice of ways so small, the event so great, Should thus entwine. Therefore oh, man, have fear Lest oldest fears be true, Lest thou too far pursue The road that seems so clear, And step, secure, a hair-breadth bourne, Which, being once crossed forever unawares, Denies return.
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget, but as an ideal, we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority. That mind is the special disease of democracy, as cruelty and servility are the special diseases of privileged societies. It will kill us all if it grows unchecked. The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other — the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow — is a prosaic barbarian. But it would be wicked folly to restore these old inequalities on the legal or external plane. Their proper place is elsewhere.
Then I dreamed that one day there was nothing but milk for them and the jailer said as he put down the pipkin: 'Our relations with the cow are not delicate-as you can easily see if you imagine eating any of her other secretions.' … John said, 'Thank heavens! Now at last I know that you are talking nonsense. You are trying to pretend that unlike things are like. You are trying to make us think that milk is the same sort of thing as sweat or dung.' 'And pray, what difference is there except by custom?' 'Are you a liar or only a fool, that you see no difference between that which Nature casts out as refuse and that which she stores up as food?'
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside of Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
The First [Friend] is the alter ego, the man who first reveals to you that you are not alone in the world by turning out (beyond hope) to share all your most secret delights. There is nothing to be overcome in making him your friend; he and you join like raindrops on a window. But the Second Friend is the man who disagrees with you about everything... Of course he shares your interests; otherwise he would not become your friend at all. But he has approached them all at a different angle. he has read all the right books but has got the wrong thing out of every one... How can he be so nearly right, and yet, invariably, just not right? He is as fascinating (and infuriating) as a woman.
Of course a war is entertaining. The immediate fear and suffering of the humans is a legitimate and pleasing refreshment for our myriads of toiling workers. But what permanent good does it do us unless we make use of it for bringing souls to Our Father Below? When I see the temporal suffering of humans who finally escape us, I feel as if I had been allowed to taste the first course of a rich banquet and then denied all the rest. It is worse than not to have tasted it at all. The Enemy, true to His barbarous methods of warfare, allows us to see the short misery of His favourites only to tantalize and torment us — to mock the incessant hunger, which, during this present phase of great conflict, His blockade is admittedly imposing.
We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place.) ...The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put in our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hmān, as if the pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing. The séroni could say it better than I say it now. Not better than I could say it in a poem. What you call remembering is the last part of the pleasure, as the crah is the last part of a poem. When you and I met, the meeting was over very shortly, it was nothing. Now it is growing something as we remember it. But still we know very little about it. What it will be when I remember it as I lie down to die, what it makes in me all my days till then–that is the real meeting. The other is only the beginning of it."
'But why,' (some ask), 'why, if you have a serious comment to make on the real life of men, must you do it by talking about a phantasmagoric never-never land of your own?' Because, I take it, one of the main things the author wants to say is that the real life of men is of that mythical and heroic quality. One can see the principle at work in his characterization. Much that in a realistic work would be done by 'character delineation' is here done simply by making the character an elf, a dwarf, or a hobbit. The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. Уоu thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside of the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
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: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.
It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women maundering about their lost youth, at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all round them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly (and hopelessly) trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy.
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree helping each other to one or the other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all of our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations — these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit — immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would be either a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it "Bulverism". Some day I am going to write the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father—who had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than a third—"Oh you say that because you are a man." "At that moment", E. Bulver assures us, "there flashed across my opening mind the great truth that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is wrong, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall." That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of mine is "wishful thinking." You can never come to any conclusion by examining my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong, then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant—but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with all thinking and all systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You must first find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological causes of the error.
"Ye can know nothing of the end of all things, or nothing expressible in those terms. It may be, as the Lord said to the Lady Julian, that all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well. But it's ill talking of such questions." "Because they are too terrible, Sir?" "No. Because all answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it. But if ye are trying to leap on into Eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears. Time is the very lens through which ye see — small and clear, as men see through the wrong end of a telescope — something that would otherwise be too big for ye to see at all. That thing is Freedom: the gift whereby ye most resemble your Maker and are yourselves parts of eternal reality. But ye can see it only through the lens of Time, in a little clear picture, through the inverted telescope. It is a picture of moments following one another and yourself in each moment making some choice that might have been otherwise. Neither the temporal succession nor the phantom of what ye might have chosen and didn't is itself Freedom. They are a lens. The picture is a symbol: but it's truer than any philosophical theorem (or, perhaps, than any mystic's vision) that claims to go behind it. For every attempt to see the shape of eternity except through the lens of Time destroys your knowledge of Freedom."
And now, by a transition which he did not notice, it seemed that what had begun as speech was turned into sight, or into something that can be remembered only as if it were seeing. He thought he saw the Great Dance. It seemed to be woven out of the intertwining undulation of many cords or bands of light, leaping over and under one another and mutually embraced in arabesques and flower-like subtleties. Each figure as he looked at it became the master-figure or focus of the whole spectacle, by means of which his eye disentangled all else and brought it into unity — only to be itself entangled when he looked to what he had taken for mere marginal decorations and found that there also the same hegemony was claimed, and the claim made good, yet the former pattern thereby disposed but finding in its new subordination a significance greater than that which it had abdicated. He could see also (but the word "seeing" is now plainly inadequate) wherever the ribbons or serpents of light intersected minute corpuscles of momentary brightness: and he knew somehow that these particles were the secular generalities of which history tells — people, institutions, climates of opinion, civilizations, arts, sciences and the like — ephemeral coruscations that piped their short song and vanished. The ribbons or cords themselves, in which millions of corpuscles lived and died, were the things of some different kind. At first he could not say what. But he knew in the end that most of them were individual entities. If so, the time in which the Great Dance proceeds is very unlike time as we know it. Some of the thinner more delicate cords were the beings that we call short lived: flowers and insects, a fruit or a storm of rain, and once (he thought) a wave of the sea. Others were such things we think lasting: crystals, rivers, mountains, or even stars. Far above these in girth and luminosity and flashing with colours form beyond our spectrum were the lines of personal beings, yet as different from one another in splendour as all of them from the previous class. But not all the cords were individuals: some of them were universal truths or universal qualities. It did not surprise him then to find that these and the persons were both cords and both stood together as against the mere atoms of generality which lived and died in the clashing of their streams: But afterwards, when he came back to earth, he wondered. And by now the thing must have passed together out of the region of sight as we understand it. For he says that the whole figure of these enamored and inter-inanimate circlings was suddenly revealed as the mere superficies of a far vaster pattern in four dimensions, and that figure as the boundary of yet others in other worlds: till suddenly as the movement grew yet swifter, the interweaving yet more ecstatic, the relevance of all to all yet more intense, as dimension was added to dimension and that part of him which could reason and remember was dropped further and further behind that part of him which saw, even then, at the very zenith of complexity, complexity was eaten up and faded, as a thin white cloud fades into the hard blue burning of sky, and all simplicity beyond all comprehension, ancient and young as spring, illimitable, pellucid, drew him with cords of infinite desire into its own stillness. He went up into such a quietness, a privacy, and a freshness that at the very moment when he stood farthest from our ordinary mode of being he had the sense of stripping off encumbrances and awaking from a trance, and coming to himself. With a gesture of relaxation he looked about him…

subset: commoncrawl


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Sigma Kappa provides valuable leadership development opportunities to its members. As an organization Sigma Kappa encourages our members to be involved in at least one extracurricular activity during their collegiate experience. Because of this focus on involvement outside of Sigma Kappa, our sisters are able to engage with the campus and community in ways that are important to them.
2016 Walk to End Alzheimer's in Kansas City
2016 Sisterhood Event
Greek Week 2016


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Bill of Sale - with warranty of title
Please be aware that these sample letters and forms may have legal and financial implications. Please consult with your own legal advisor if you have any questions or concerns regarding the use of any of these letters and forms.
©2004 - 2009 LettersandForms All Rights Reserved.


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Plastic Tray Bottom (1020 Flat) Used to hold rockwool cubes, Jiffy pellets or soil for seed/cuttings. This tray has holes for drainage.
10" x 20" tray: Interior measurements are on the top 10 1/4 inches by 10 1/2 inches at the rim but the bottom interior is 10" x 20 " inches.
— Ships from Portland, Oregon USA.


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This title teaches students that everything is made of matter, and that physical changes create different forms or states of matter. Gives examples of these different states in easy to understand text and introduces students to the Law of Conservation of Mass.
This title introuduces students to the basic concept of sounds. How sounds can be heard but not seen. How sound is a form of energy that is transmitted through sound waves which travel through your eardrum to be heard. How sound travels through air and at what rate of speed. Useful examples are given throughout to help students understand the concept.
With an emphasis on how important light is to our Earth, this title explains how light effects photosynthesis, how light travels, the different properties of light and how both animals and people depend on it. Whether it's ultraviolet light that help bees pollinate flowers to solar panels that use the Sun's light to heat our homes, it's all addressed in this beautifully illustrated book.
STEM technology is a very important topic in today's world and this book will allow students to learn more about atoms, molecules, how different temperatures and situations affect them. It also introduces them to the periodic talbe of elements and how even today more elements are being discovered and the periodic table continues to grow
Three quarters of our Earth is blanketed by water. How this water is used, from bathing to irrigating crops is addressed. That water travels in a never-ending pattern called the water cycle. Tips on how to use our most important natural resource
This ever popular subject is explained in detail in this wonderful book. How the Earth is made from rock, the three different types of rock and how they are made and where they can be found. Talks about how fossils are formed from sediment and what role that plays in helping us learn about life long ago. Talks about how these fossilized plants and animals became the fossil fuels that are so important to our present and future life on Earth.
How our Earth and existence depend on plants is introduced in this title. Their uses for food, alternative forms of fuel, and everyday discoveries of how plants have a medicinal effect on curing diseases and promoting good health are all addressed. Introduces their role in preventing and reversing the important issue of global warming helps introduce students to just how important plants are.


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Mallory Atlanta Herbold and Brendan Francis Kennedy, both of Jacksonville, were united in marriage on Dec. 29, 2012, at the MCAS Cherry Point Chapel.
Mallory Atlanta Herbold and Brendan Francis Kennedy, both of Jacksonville, were united in marriage on Dec. 29, 2012, at the MCAS Cherry Point Chapel. The Rev. William Edward Herbold Jr. performed the 3 p.m. ceremony. The wedding was directed by Katelyn Williams. Music was provided by pianist, Sonja Williams and vocalist, Anthony Williams.
The bride is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Gary Herbold of Jacksonville. She is the granddaughter of Mr. and Mrs. Bill Cruikshank of Jacksonville.
The groom is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Jay Kennedy of King�s Point, N.Y. He is the grandson of Mrs. Barbara Negus of Austin, Texas, and Mr. and Mrs. John Kennedy of Clifton Park, N.Y.
The rehearsal dinner was held at the Chelsea Restaurant in New Bern.
The bride was attended by her brother, Benjamin Herbold of Annapolis, Md. Bridesmaids were Patricia Mills of Jacksonville; Amy Herbold of Pylesville, Md.; Katie Herring of Greenville; Gina Guareno of Raleigh; and Jackie Barnum of Annapolis, Md. Flower girl was Mia Elise Johnson.
The groom chose his brother, Christopher Kennedy of Bury St. Edmonds, England, as his best man. Groomsmen were Robert Kennedy of Annapolis, Md.; Allen Ratliff of Oklahoma City, Okla.; Jonathan Teeter of Jacksonville; and Matthew Ng and Christopher Teeter, both of Raleigh. Ushers were Jacob Schulz and Jimmy Johnson.
Readers were Jaimie Nichols and Lindsey Lynch. Program attendant was Hillary Spear.
The wedding reception was held at New Bern Golf and Country Club.
The bride graduated from Jacksonville High School, North Carolina State University and East Carolina University. She is employed with CarolinaEast Medical Center in New Bern.
The groom graduated from White Oak High School and is attending East Carolina University. He is employed with Operation Re-Entry-N.C. in Greenville.
The couple took a honeymoon trip to Savannah, Ga.
They reside in New Bern.


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Picnic Time Metro Basket Stanford Cardinal Embroidered
You Pay: $59.95 Free Shipping Free Exchanges 100% Price Guarantee
Oops! This product is currently Out of Stock.
The Metro Basket is a lightweight fully-collapsible, insulated basket that can be used for many occasions. It's made of durable 600D polyester canvas in red and features a water-resistant interior and expandable drawstring top and sturdy aluminum frame from which the canvas detaches. Easy to clean and versatile, the Metro Basket is a thoughtful gift for those always on the go.
- Dimensions: 19" x 11" x 10"


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Customized TV Listings are available here: www.latimes.com/tvtimes
Community The study group organizes a game of Dungeons and Dragons to reunite Hickey (Jonathan Banks) with his estranged son (David Cross), who's just become a dad. Joel McHale, Gillian Jacobs, Yvette Nicole Brown and Danny PudiNBC also star in this new episode. 8 p.m.
Hell's Kitchen Challenge winners go to San Francisco, and the losing team picks carrots at a farm in this new episode. 8 p.m. Fox
It's a time for the women of the castle to mingle with would-be suitors, but Lola (Anna Popplewell) isn't interested in participating, which bothers Mary (Adelaide Kane). 9 p.m. KTLA
Grey's Anatomy Bailey (Chandra Wilson) invites Richard (James Pickens Jr.) to scrub in on a big case on his birthday. Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) hires a research assistant. Keke Palmer and Debbie Allen also guest star in this new episode. 9 p.m. ABC
American Idol
It's Jennifer Lopez's turn to perform in this results episode. Royal Teeth also performs. 9 p.m. Fox
Feelings of abandonment resurface for Victor (Xolo Mariduena) when Joel (Sam Jaeger) fails to pick him up from baseball. Mae Whitman and Max Burkholder also star in this new episode. 10 p.m. NBC
Scandal Sally and Fitz (Kate Burton, Tony Goldwyn) both want the National Rifle Association's endorsement, Kerry Washington, Guillermo Diaz, Columbus Short and Darby Stanchfield also star in this new episode. 10 p.m. ABC
CBS This Morning Hanna Rosin. (N) 7 a.m. KCBS
Today Veronica Roth; Ansel Elgort; John Leguizamo; Margaret Cho; Brooke Elliott; Sissy Biggers. (N) 7 a.m. KNBC
KTLA Morning News
(N) 7 a.m. KTLA
Good Morning America Jennifer Connelly; Jack Hanna; David Zinczenko. (N) 7 a.m. KABC
Good Day L.A.
Rachel Zalis; tWitch ("Drop Dead Diva") NASCAR driver Kurt Busch; Dominic Monaghan ("Wild Things With Dominic Monaghan"). (N) 7 a.m. KTTV
Live With Kelly and Michael Cher; Mark Wahlberg. (N) 9 a.m. KABC
The View
Guest co-host Mario Lopez; Sally Jessy Raphael. (N) 10 a.m. KABC
The Doctors Robin Quivers. 11 a.m. KCAL
The Wendy Williams Show
Miss Piggy ("Muppets Most Wanted"); Dr. Robi Ludwig and Jennifer Hutt ("Dr. Drew on Call"). (N) 11 a.m. KTTV
The Dr. Oz Show Weight loss. 2 p.m. KABC
Kate Gosselin; Julianne Moore. 3 p.m. KABC
The Ellen DeGeneres Show President Barack Obama; Lauren Graham; Shaun White; Derek and Julianne Hough; Brandy Clark performs. (N) 4 p.m. KNBC
The Queen Latifah Show
Ashley Judd and Zoë Kravitz ("Divergent"); Eric Paslay performs. (N) 7 p.m. KCAL
The Arsenio Hall Show Kanye West and Big Sean perform. 11 p.m. KTLA
Charlie Rose
(N) 11 p.m. KVCR; midnight KOCE; 1 a.m. KLCS
Chelsea Lately Brad Wollack; Shaun White. (N) 11 p.m. E!
Mark Wahlberg. 11 p.m. TBS, 12:30 a.m. TBS
The Tonight Show: Jimmy Fallon Chelsea Clinton; Billy Joel performs. (N) 11:34 p.m. KNBC
Late Show With David Letterman
Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting. 11:35 p.m. KCBS
Jimmy Kimmel Live Don Cheadle; Tony Goldwyn; Enrique Iglesias performs. (N) 11:35 p.m. KABC
Late Night With Seth Meyers
Greg Kinnear; Shailene Woodley; Band of Skulls performs. (N) 12:36 a.m. KNBC
The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson Joseph Gordon-Levitt. 12:37 a.m. KCBS
(N) 12:37 a.m. KABC
Tavis Smiley Author Peniel E. Joseph; Martina McBride. (N) 1 a.m. KOCE
Last Call With Carson Daly
Oscar nominee Freida Mock; Sirah performs; "Bad Words." (N) 1:37 a.m. KNBC


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About the link to this site
In this site, a link is free.
When you have you link to your site, I am happy if you can use the following information.
(your thing having you edit it as needed does not have a problem)
- Site title
- A site title becomes available.
- The URL of the site enters.
- Commentary
- The commentary sentence of the site becomes available.
Collection of links


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The Yong In 1-Week Introductory Course includes:
The cost is only $19.95. Basic Tae Kwon Do stance, kicks, and punches are taught.
Call us to set up an appointment for the private lessons at (615) 591-3373.
FAQ (Read all)
Why Choose Yong In?
The only Traditional World Tae Kwon Do Federation instructor in Williamson County, TN.
Many people begin training in Martial Arts for different reasons. At Yong In, members benefits include physical fitness, increased confidence and self-discipline, improved focus and the experience of a unique family activity. Though you may consider joining with only one reason in mind, you will soon be pleasantly surprised by the variety of benefits you will enjoy from your training.
Home · About Yong In · Programs · Calendar · Staff · Gallery · Contact
Website & Media Development by SKOOGE


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SOCORRO, N.M., March 11, 2003 -- The New Mexico Tech Board of Regents recently approved multi-year contracts awarded to three travel agencies, which will provide departments and research divisions at the university with comprehensive travel services in an efficient and cost-effective manner.
Under the contract agreements, travel-related services such as procuring airline reservations and tickets, car rentals, and hotel accommodations will all be done through one of the three agencies selected through a competitive bid process.
The travel agencies selected are: Aquila Travel (located in Albuquerque); Paradise Travel (located in Socorro); and Rio Grande Travel (located in Albuquerque).
William Schattschneider, director of purchasing at New Mexico Tech, says consolidating the travel services available to the university will prove to be more cost-effective -- especially in relation to international travel--since, under contract stipulations, transaction fees have been established for both domestic and international travel on a fixed-rate basis.
"Another important factor in developing the new travel contracts relates to the establishment of performance measures," Schattschneider explains. "Performance measures have been established that define the contracted agencies' responsibilities for providing timely service to the university."
He adds that the performance measures will continue to be monitored and evaluated in exercising a two-year option written into the contracts.
"In addition, all the contracted agencies will now be able to provide New Mexico Tech employees with numerous means of
communicating travel needs, such as through phone, fax, e-mail, and an established website," Schattschneider says.
"The contracted agencies' website will be linked to the New Mexico Tech Purchasing Office's website as a means of assisting our employees with their travel requirements," he says.
A vendor fair to introduce New Mexico Tech employees to the contracted travel agencies and the travel services which are now available is being planned for sometime in April.


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You are hereForums › Digital Scrapbooking Challenges › Designer Challenges › Designer Challenge - Make An Alpha - Deadline March 23
Designer Challenge - Make An Alpha - Deadline March 23
Wow, Sunny & Jessica..... Loving you're alpha's
I am an Alpha-holic and never skip the chance to make another one. So happy was I to see this challenge. Here is my entry. You can download it from my blog: http://nothingbutfreebies.blogspot.dk/2013/03/pixel-scraper-challenge.html
Trine, Danish Design
Thank you so much everybody for the beautiful Alpha's you have all made, they are all great!!!!!!!!!!!
I didn't see an alpha with March's Chinese Orient blog train, so to kill two birds with one stone, I made the alpha challenge to coordinate with the Chinese Orient Blog Train. The colors also look good with Marisa Lerin's Spring Fields Kit.
I decided that some people may like the whole alpha on a single sheet, while others prefer an individual file for each letter, therefore I zipped them that way, so you can download which ever file you prefer. It should be faster that way.
Here is the zipped single sheet.
Here is the zip of the individual files of PNGs on a transparent background.
Both files have uppercase, lowercase, and common punctuation symbols all at 300 dpi. The capital letters are an inch tall.
I decided not to do the psd file.
Molly, thanks. Not discouraging at all. I took your advice and decided not to do the PSD file for the alpha. Then to make the downloading even faster, I gave people a choice of which way they'd prefer (single sheet or individual files). I myself like the individual files, so I can just drag them onto my page. But the individual page make it clearer whether you are getting the uppercase "C" or the lowercase "c."
Wow, everyone is doing such an awesome job! Wonderful work ladies!
Wow...I really need to kick myself into gear and get started. These alphabets are fantastic!!
ladies, each alpha is so different but really cool and i could think of ways to use them as i scrolled down the thread!! it's really exciting to see such cool work! thank you so much for sharing
Thank you all for sharing your alphas.
beautifull alphas! congratulations
@Engela- Your alpha rocks! Absolutely fabu!
Everyone has done so well... I need to get my butt in gear!
learning and creating together is just awesome, such a great challenge with so many wonderful alpha's! (can't wait till friday for the next challange )
Wow ladies!! I spy some beautiful alpha's here!!!
I've been working on my alpha's but it's proving to be a tad bit tricky for me ... I can't seem to get them right LOL ... Practice makes perfect right? I've almost got my first one totally finished! I'll upload after work today.
Can`t wait to see you`re alpha Angela.... the more you try... the easier it gets
Great alphas, every one is wonderful. I'm trying my first but it's much more complicated than I imagined. Don't know if I'll finish for the challenge but I'll keep plugging away.
(Several hours later!!)Wahoo, I did it! And here is the finished product. It was a real learning experience even if no one can use them, but it may be my last alpha. I never truly appreciated before just how much work it is to make all these lovely alphas I download so blithely. A heartfelt thank you to all designers.
The font I used is Cool Dots.
Okay here is my attempt. This was a tremendous learning experience for me. I started with the Century Gothic font and tweaked the dimensions of it. Made a yellow stripe template, and used the clipping mask option. Then I followed Marisa's tutorial on "Making a 3D Plastic Bubble Effect". I tweaked the numbers and settings from the tutorial, and am not sure if I totally love it, but I went with it anyway because making an alpha DOES take forever and I didn't want to go back!
I'm so glad I took part in the challenge. I learned a lot and now feel very empowered to start designing more!
I forgot to add that this alpha is for Personal Use.
Pick it up here.
Woooo awesome!!
@Molly: your download link is linked to the image instead of download
@Engela, your alpha is great and it will go perfectly with the Chinese Orient blog train! But in case you were wanting to use the stuff from the train, there were two alphas shared. FranB shared a fortune cookie alpha and HunnyBee Design had a typewriter key alpha.
Just in case you were looking for alphas. Yours is awesome too and I'm looking forward to trying it out! I'm excited to have more because I really liked that blog train.
@cat Since I need to this digi scrapbooking game how do yo use an alpha that on one sheet and what would be the advantage?
Beautiful fonts everyone. Thank you for your hard work. I also want to say thanks for making previews it really helps with organizing all the digi supplies.
Here is mine! I started with one alpha in one color... but, see, I had a whole set of those styles (they are by Aimee Harrison, aren't they AWESOME???), and it looked so cool... Well, in the end I ended up with 6 complete alphas. I've made a sampler freebie, which is available until March 31st on my blog! The full bundle will be added to my store tomorrow if anyone is interested!
Ok here are mine ... I'm still learning how to designing ... but it sure is fun!! I have the freebie up on my blog, you can visit it here.
Download here. (MediaFire)
Fantastic challenge, Marisa. I adore fonts and styles and playing around with typography, but I had never made an entire alphabet until today. Go, me!
And go all of YOU! So many wonderfully creative and fun alphas have been shared so far. I am so impressed with the enthusiasm and creativity being shown in response to these designing challenges.
I haven´t have time to download your portions yet, but there are lots of fantastic alphas! Thanks for sharing. I also finished my very first alpha. It was most difficult than I thought, because the font I choose as basis had some problems I needed to fix. Today, the download is on my blog, because it´s an add-on to my last freebie:
There are so many great alphas here! I started to create one and got stuck. Life has taken over, and I'm not sure if I'll get back to it before time runs out. But I still have in mind to design one. Thanks for a great challenge!
Hi Girls...
Well, here my Alpha. My 1st project 100% made in Photoshop. I hope you enjoy it!
Also, all your alphas are realy amazing, congratulations for all.
Donwload here: http://goo.gl/yYlG9
Beautiful alpha Holly... I love the two tone rusty grungy look. Thanks for the link.
Wonderful alpha Heliton, I really like the font you used and the color has an awesome neon look.


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The best part was the landing
Jan 28, 2019
Amazing feeling in the air, I would recommend this to everybody
Reviewed By: Emma F.
Amazing experience !
Soizic -- Feb 11, 2016 07:12 am
My first balloon ride... Thoroughly enjoyed the hot air balloon experience. Collected from central Barcelona. Had an amazing flight, finished off with a cheese toasty and champagne. Great team. Brilliant!
Una actividad recomendable
Ricardo -- Nov 05, 2013 10:15 am
Primera vez en globo, fue una agradable sorpresa! Lo recomiendo a cualquiera, es un regalo perfecto! Nos vinieron a buscar a Barcelona, nos llevaron hasta un sitio precioso donde se prepara el globo. Muy recomendable realmente!
Philippe -- Feb 13, 2013 07:29 am
An amazing experience for those who appreciate the nature, silence, and contemplation... I just spent One of the best hours of my Life upthere, over the beautiful catalonian landscapes... Moreover the team was awesome: they speak english ( which is not often the case in spain believe me...)and they picked us up directly in Barcelona city centre. Our pilot Nicolas is a true passionate: I really appreciated to share the adventure with someone who lives his passion. Definitively recommend It to everyone
Amazing ballooning
Soizic -- Jun 25, 2009 11:17 am
I book the hot air balloon ride with ballooning, the team is great and speak perfectly english ! The experience was wonderfull, I felt so "light" and "destressed" by floating in the air. Perfect organization, perfect team for a sensational experience. I strongly recommend that activity in Barcelona.
Excellent experience !
Ricardo -- Mar 28, 2009 04:28 pm
Great day with my wife in Barcelona. We made a wonderfull balloon ride above the clouds and over the catalonian lanscapes. Great team and a good picnic after the ballon flight ... We recommend the activity.