C. S. Lewis Quotes About Chastity

• After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hands, Always Trying, Soul

• Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Virtue, Chastity

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.127, Simon and Schuster

• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

  C. S. Lewis

  Courage, Honesty, Hypocrite

  In Cyril Connolly 'The Unquiet Grave' (1944) ch. 31

• 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!

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Energy, World

  C. S. Lewis (1995). “The Screwtape Letters”, Bantam Classics

• When he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realized that while his lips had been saying 'Oh Lord, make me chaste,' his heart had been secretly adding, 'But please don't do it just yet.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Men, Years

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.91, HarperCollins UK

• Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it 'for a reasonable period'--and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.

  C. S. Lewis

  Fun, Men, Yield

  C. S. Lewis (1995). “The Screwtape Letters”, Bantam Classics

• It's all love or sex these days. Friendship is almost as quaint and outdated a notion as chastity. Soon friends will be like the elves and the pixies - fabulous mythical creatures from a distant past.

  C. S. Lewis

  Friendship, Sex, Past

• Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Faithfulness, Virtue

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