The primary function of mental pain, says Lewis, is to force our misdirectedness on our attention. But just as it belongs to our fallen state to be blind to holiness until we suffer the consequences of sin, and blind to a higher good until natural satisfactions are snatched from us; so equally it belongs to our state that we cannot achieve disinterestedness until it costs us pain. Jocelyn Gibb
About This Quote

Lewis wrote this in "Surprised by Joy" in which he was discussing the concepts of joy and suffering. He believes that since we are fallen, we cannot achieve joy or God’s favor until it causes us pain. The pain that causes us to give up on things that seem important only hurts us in the long run.

Source: Light On C. S. Lewis

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More Quotes By Jocelyn Gibb
  1. What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life, he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except for a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals.. Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own...
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  3. What I think is true is that at a certain stage in his life he deliberately ceased to take any interest in himself except as a kind of spiritual alumnus taking his moral finals.. Self-knowledge for him had come to mean recognition of his own...
  4. God's 'permission' of evil so multiplied is not simply to be accounted for by his respecting our free will. He takes the harms we mutually inflict and overrules them for our good.
  5. Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which...
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