C. S. Lewis Quotes About Feelings

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Being In Love, Love Is, Feelings

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.197, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God's love for us does not.

  C. S. Lewis

  God, Christian Inspirational, Feelings

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Heart, Silence

• Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

  C. S. Lewis

  True Love, Famous Love, Falling In Love

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.37, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

  C. S. Lewis

  Determination, Feelings, Doe

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.115, HarperCollins UK

• 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. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Love You, Love Is

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Prayer, Mean

  "Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1963.

• ‎"Don't bother too much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them; when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behavior

  C. S. Lewis

  Selfish, Humble, Conceited

• No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves. They are all holy when God's hand is on the rein. They all go bad when they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Religious, Hands

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.122, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You can be good for the mere sake of goodness; you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness. You can do a kind action when you are not feeling kind and when it gives you no pleasure, simply because kindness is right; but no one ever did a cruel action simply because cruelty is wrong - only because cruelty is pleasant or useful to him, In other words, badness cannot succeed even in being bad in the same way in which goodness is good. Goodness is, so to speak, itself: badness is only spoiled goodness. And there must be something good first before it can be spoiled.

  C. S. Lewis

  Kindness, Giving, Feelings

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I think I am beginning to understand why grief feels like suspense. It comes from the frustration of so many impulses that had become habitual. Thought after thought feeling after feeling action after action had H. for their object. Now their target is gone. I keep on through habit fitting an harrow to the string then I remember and have to lay the bow down. So many roads lead through to H. I set out on one of them. But now there's an impassable frontier-post across it. So many roads once now so many culs de sac.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Thinking, Frustration

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.24, Faber & Faber

• Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead.

  C. S. Lewis

  Thinking, Feelings, Trying

  C.S. Lewis (2014). “A Grief Observed Readers' Edition: With contributions from Hilary Mantel, Jessica Martin, Jenna Bailey, Rowan Williams, Kate Saunders, Francis Spufford and Maureen Freely”, p.21, Faber & Faber

• Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God--experiences compared with which many thrills of pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further you must use the map.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Confused, Real

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• People talk as if grief were just a feeling -- as if it weren't the continually renewed shock of setting out again and again on familiar roads and being brought up short by the grim frontier post that now blocks them.

  C. S. Lewis

  Block, Grief, People

• Grief ... gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn't seem worth starting anything. I can't settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Giving, Feelings

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.17, Faber & Faber

• When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.

  C. S. Lewis

  Often Is, Feelings, Friendly

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.75, Simon and Schuster

• Lucy woke out of the deepest sleep you can imagine, with the feeling that the voice she liked best in the world had been calling her name.

  C. S. Lewis

  Sleep, Names, Voice

• Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Mean, People

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.113, HarperCollins UK

• As to...old composers like Schubert or Beethoven, I imagine that, while modern music expresses both feeling, thought and imagination, they expressed pure feeling. And you know all day sitting at work, eating, walking, etc., you have hundreds of feelings that can't be put into words. And that is why I think that in a sense music is the highest of the arts, because it really begins where the others leave off.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, Imagination

• And He [God] and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble--delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.

  C. S. Lewis

  Silly, Humble, Two

• On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Men, Thinking

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.84, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  God, Night, Feelings

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Yours, Jack: The Inspirational Letters of C. S. Lewis”, p.9, HarperCollins UK

• I have been feeling very much lately that cheerful insecurity is what our Lord asks of us.

  C. S. Lewis

  Feelings, Insecurity, Cheerful

• Our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Taken, People

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.12, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• The value given to the testimony of any feeling must depend on our whole philosophy, not our whole philosophy on a feeling.

  C. S. Lewis

  Philosophy, Feelings, Given

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Christian Reflections”, p.50, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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