C. S. Lewis on 'Being in Love'

The trouble arises when poets and others set up this good thing as an absolute. Which many do. An innocent and well-intentioned emphasis on the importance of being-in-love with one's spouse (i.e. its superiority over lust or ambition as a basis for marriage) is in fact widely twisted into the doctrine that only being-in-love sanctifies marriage and that therefore as soon as you are tired of your spouse you get a divorce.

Thus the overpraising of a finite good, the pretense that it is absolute, defeats itself and corrupts the very good it set out to exalt, reducing marriage to mere concubinage.

Treat 'Love' as a god and you in fact make it a fiend.

--a 1942 letter to Daphne Harwood, in The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 511

Lewis: Temptation and Sin

C. S. Lewis, letter to Mary Neylan, January 20, 1942:

I know all about the despair of overcoming chronic temptations.

It is not serious provided self-offended petulance, annoyance at breaking records, impatience etc doesn't get the upper hand. No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes are airing in the cupboard.

The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present to us: it is the very sign of His presence.

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 507; emphasis original

How to Read the Bible through the Jesus Lens

Eat There

You wouldn't commend a restaurant without having eaten there, been nourished by it, even if you know all the recipes and menus by heart with perfect clarity.

So don't commend the gospel of grace unless you've eaten there, been nourished by it, even if you know all the creeds and confessions by heart with perfect clarity.

Irresistible

C. S. Lewis, writing to his friend Dom Bede Griffiths, after Lewis heard Charles Williams (pictured), one of the Inklings, give a lecture at Oxford in 1941:

He is an ugly man with rather a cockney voice. But no one ever thinks of this for five minutes after he has begun speaking. His face almost becomes angelic. Both in public and private he is of nearly all the men I have met the one whose address most overflows with love. It is simply irresistible.

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 501, emphasis original