C. S. Lewis Quotes About Compliments

• If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

  C. S. Lewis

  Kindness, Records, Definitions

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works”, p.20, Harper Collins

• God has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

  C. S. Lewis

  Compliment, Tragic, Inexorable

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.39, Simon and Schuster

• But the most obvious fact about praise — whether of God or anything — strangely escaped me. I thought of it in terms of compliment, approval, or the giving of honor. I had never noticed that all enjoyment spontaneously overflows into praise unless (sometimes even if) shyness or the fear of boring others is deliberately brought in to check it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Player, Thinking, Games

  "Joyful Christian".

• Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.

  C. S. Lewis

  Years, Supposing That, Temptation

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition”, p.9, Harper Collins

• We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment; it is its appointed consummation. It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are; the delight is incomplete till it is expressed.

  C. S. Lewis

  Beautiful, Delight, Lovers

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.119, Simon and Schuster

• The Calormens have dark faces and long beards. They wear flowing robes and orange-colored turbans, and they are a wise, wealthy, courteous, cruel and ancient people. They bowed most politely to Caspian and paid him long compliments all about the fountains of prosperity irrigating the gardens of prudence and virtue --and things like that-- but of course what they wanted was the money they had paid.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Dark, Garden

• We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

  C. S. Lewis

  Writing, Trying, Pieces

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “An Experiment in Criticism”, p.32, Cambridge University Press

• When we want to be something other than the thing that God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy...whether we like it or not, God intends to give us what we need, not what we now think we want. Once more, we are embarrassed by the intolerable compliment, by too much love, not too little.

  C. S. Lewis

  Thinking, Giving, Needs

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