C. S. Lewis Quotes About Suffering

• I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Pain, Block

• Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Grief, Sadness

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.7, Faber & Faber

• No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Healing, Grieving

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.5, Faber & Faber

• I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Thinking, People

• Why love, if losing hurts so much? I have no answers anymore: only the life I have lived. Twice in that life I've been given the choice: as a boy and as a man. The boy chose safety, the man chooses suffering. The pain now is part of the happiness then. That's the deal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hurt, Pain, Boys

• We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, 'Blessed are they that mourn,' and I accept it. I've got nothing that I hadn't bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Blessed, Reality

• I'm not sure God wants us to be happy. I think he wants us to love, and be loved. But we are like children, thinking our toys will make us happy and the whole world is our nursery. Something must drive us out of that nursery and into the lives of others, and that something is suffering.

  C. S. Lewis

  Children, Thinking, Suffering

• The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love", and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest "well pleased".

  C. S. Lewis

  Love Is, Men, Long

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Offering, Broken

• 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

  C. S. Lewis

  Life, Order, Suffering

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.28, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective...That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some temporary suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me but have 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.

  C. S. Lewis

  Inspirational, Dream, Religious

• I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state, but a process. It needs not a map, but a history, and if I don't stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there's no reason why I should ever stop.

  C. S. Lewis

  Grief, Writing, Suffering

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.29, Faber & Faber

• Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something, together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not.

  C. S. Lewis

  Suffering, Together, Enjoy

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “That Hideous Strength”, p.145, Simon and Schuster

• It takes courage to live through suffering; and it takes honesty to observe it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Honesty, Suffering

• The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.

  C. S. Lewis

  Pain, Real, Believe

• So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. But suppose God became a man... He could surrender His will, suffer and die, because He was a man.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Suffering, Needs

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.60, HarperCollins UK

• Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?

  C. S. Lewis

  Writing, Men, Suffering

• There must, whether the gods see it or not, be something great in the mortal soul. For suffering, it seems, is infinite, and our capacity without limit.

  C. S. Lewis

  Soul, Suffering, Limits

  C. S. Lewis (1980). “Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold”, p.283, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• If, as I can't help suspecting, the dead also feel the pains of separation (and this may be one of their purgatorial sufferings), then for both lovers, and for all pairs of lovers without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.

  C. S. Lewis

  Love, Pain, Bereavement

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.25, Faber & Faber

• The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word "love."

  C. S. Lewis

  Love Is, Long, Suffering

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.86, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, Blessed are they that morn.

  C. S. Lewis

  Blessed, Suffering, Program

• I am suffering incessant temptations to uncharitable thoughts at present; one of those black moods in which nearly all one's friends seem to be selfish or even false. And how terrible that there should be even a kind of pleasure in thinking evil.

  C. S. Lewis

  Selfish, Thinking, Evil

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3: Narnia, Cambridge, and Joy, 1950 - 1963”, p.6, Harper Collins

• I can answer that only by hearsay, returned the Guide, for pain is a secret which he has shared with your race and not with mine; and you would find it as hard to explain suffering to me as I would find it to reveal to you the secrets of the Mountain people. But those who know best say this, that any liberal man would choose the pain of this desire, even for ever, rather than the peace of feeling it no longer; and that though the best thing is to have, the next best is to want, and the worst of all is not to want.

  C. S. Lewis

  Pain, Men, Race

• Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.

  C. S. Lewis

  Kindness, Animal, People

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.38, Simon and Schuster

• Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

  C. S. Lewis

  Suffering, Hopeless, Tribulation

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.175, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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