Life & Wisdom Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis rigs the sentence like a moral booby trap: choose truth and you might earn comfort as a byproduct; choose comfort and you lose both. The contrast isn’t just philosophical, it’s behavioral. He’s diagnosing a particular habit of mind - the way people shop for ideas the way they shop for mattresses, testing beliefs for coziness instead of sturdiness.

The rhetoric is slyly pastoral. “May find comfort” is deliberately modest, almost legalistic, refusing to guarantee emotional payoff. That restraint is the hook: truth doesn’t promise to soothe you, which is precisely why it can be trusted. By comparison, “soft soap” lands like a slap. It’s old-fashioned slang for flattery and lubricant, suggesting comfort-as-a-goal turns thinking into self-massage: you pre-soothe the conclusion, then call it conviction. “Wishful thinking to begin” implies the rot starts early, at the moment you pick the question you’re willing to ask.

Context matters: Lewis, an Oxford don and Christian apologist writing in a century scarred by world wars and ideological salesmanship, had watched “comfort” become a public virtue marketed by politics and consumer culture alike. His warning is less about stoicism for its own sake than about spiritual and intellectual hygiene. If you demand that reality feel nice, you don’t get a gentler reality; you get a thinner one. The final word, “despair,” isn’t melodrama. It’s the logical endpoint of a life built on anesthesia: when pain finally breaks through, you have neither truth to stand on nor comfort that can carry weight.