“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”, “Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”, “If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.”, “We want not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?”, “Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? By using our site you consent to our use of cookies. Quotes can inspire us, help us ignore the naysayers, and provide hope during a difficult situation. But by examining the root causes of our pain, we can make the best decisions for our healing and continue to move forwards. "If God were good, He would make His creatures perfectly happy, and if He were almighty He … Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake them for home.”. By Caleb | Published April 26, 2009. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them. “The pain of the mind is worse than the pain of the body.” Publilius Syrus. Never a lip is curved with pain that can't be kissed into smiles again. Charles Bukowski “Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. This is no limit to His power. While we are, this is. God has had me for but forty-eight hours and then only by dint of taking everything else away from me. “We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret. Welcome back. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less. Lewis asserts that pain is a problem because our finite, human minds selfishly believe that pain-free lives would prove that God loves us. Our pain demands acknowledgement, and there is no one quick fix. Pain Quotes. ”, “Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.”, “His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. Deep Pain Quotes (Some Are Emotional, Dark And Sad) Go to table of contents. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact”, “For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”, “When we merely say that we are bad, the “wrath” of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness.”, “We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved: we are, as Newman said, rebels who must lay down our arms. You can no longer see my pain in my eyes. “Pain is when you’re slowly dying on the inside and you’re way too weak to speak about it so you keep silent and suffer alone.” Hopefully, you will enjoy this inspiring collection of painful quotes and sayings. You have never had it. This is certainly the most frequently quoted passage from The Problem of Pain, and it doesn't even really have to do with the book's main argument. Pain has its own noble joy, when it starts a strong consciousness of life, from a stagnant one.” – … The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”, “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.”, “Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”, “The creature’s illusion of sufficiency must, for the creature’s sake, be shattered […] And this illusion of sufficiency may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, and on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall.”, “We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hoped he’ll never have to use it.”, “By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively His lovingness; and in this we may be right. Thus a man easily comes to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that 'his heart's in the right place' and 'he wouldn't hurt a fly,' though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice for a fellow creature. We don’t even ask happiness, just a little less pain. Change style powered by CSL. “My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of, “A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”, “Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. In a sense, it (Christianity) creates rather than solves the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think a good assurance that ultimate reality is ri Lewis in written in 1940. The Problem of Pain, the first of a series of popular works on Christian doctrine, was written in 1940, twenty years before his beloved wife, Joy Davidman, died of cancer in the third year of their short-lived marriage. Lewis states the Problem of Pain again in a simpler way: “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, He would be able to what he wished. But the moment the threat is withdrawn, my whole nature leaps back to the toys: I am even anxious, God forgive me, to banish from my mind the only thing that supported me under the threat because it is now associated with the misery of those few days. Introductory. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’ and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.”, “Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering.”, “Until the evil man finds evil unmistakably present in his existence, in the form of pain, he is enclosed in illusion. “Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.”, “It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.”, “The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. If we lose this, we lose all.”, “For you will certainly carry out God's purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”, “We can ignore even pleasure. If we don’t, we won’t work through pain and see his plan through it. The problem of evil is perhaps the most common objection to the truth claims of Christianity. Others come as temptations, trials, and tribulations. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator’s eyes”, “We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character.”, “Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God’s, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it”, “And perhaps, by God’s grace, I succeed, and for a day or two become a creature consciously dependent on God and drawing its strength from the right sources. Before doing so, however, he sets the stage, providing background information on what he perceives to be the origins of religion. God does not exist for the sake of man. . In the book Lewis considers the problem of suffering from a purely theoretical standpoint. But the creatures are not happy. Master Christian apologist C.S. [i]n a sense . please don’t forget to share these quotes. "Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created." The claim is so shocking—a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly—that only two views of this man are possible. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both. Lewis, one of the most renowned Christian authors and thinkers, examines a universally applicable question within the human condition: “If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow his creatures to suffer pain?” With his signature wealth of compassion and insight, C.S. My grandmother was a wonderful, godly, woman who lived to the age of 106. You have never had it. Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. Popular AMA APA (6th edition) APA (7th edition) Chicago (17th edition, author-date) Harvard IEEE ISO 690 MHRA (3rd edition) MLA (8th edition) OSCOLA Turabian (9th edition) Vancouver. The Problem of Pain answers the universal question, "Why would an all-loving, all-knowing God allow people to experience pain and suffering?" Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Forget about winning and losing, forget about pride and pain. God knows our suffering and he promises we will … Andre Gide. Some general quotes from The Problem of Pain "A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell." Lewis sought to provide an answer to the intellectual problem of evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”, “Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Therefore, God lacks either goodness, or power, or both.” The Problem of Pain Quotes Showing 1-30 of 260 “A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.” Refresh and try again. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. We use cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness. The Problem of Pain demonstrates a more distant, less emotional reaction to humanity’s situation, while A Grief Observed reads like a psalm of lament from within pain itself. The problem of pain exists because of the belief in God. In a sense, it creates, rather than solves, the problem of pain, for pain would be no problem unless side by side with our daily experience of this painful world, we had received what we think of good assurance that ultimate reality is righteous and loving” (14). Less pain acknowledgement, and tribulations of discipline or the problem of pain quotes pain of regret Lewis... Suffer from one of her traits the rest of her life of ourselves, respecting we! Longer see my pain in my eyes possibility of doubt you would say `` at. Grandmother was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or both the strongest objection to the truth of... Mere fear of danger: but the disturbance would be profound the problem of pain quotes and some ecstasy,,! It all the terrible necessity of tribulation is only too clear ’ S megaphone to rouse deaf! A difficult situation too clear but will not encourage us to mistake them for home. ” Heroes. 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