Love Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is smuggling a hard-edged claim into a sentence that sounds like a sigh. Love, he argues, is not chiefly a spell that makes you stupid; its “miracle” is that it can survive contact with reality. The key move is the distinction between seeing through enchantment and becoming leads a lesser mind to cynicism. He grants that love enchants - it idealizes, magnifies, casts a glow - but insists mature love develops a kind of double vision: it notices the lighting tricks while still choosing the person in the room.

The subtext is quietly polemical. Lewis is pushing back against two fashionable postures: sentimental romanticism (love as permanent intoxication) and the modern pose of sophistication (debunking as a personality). “Disenchanted” isn’t just disappointed; it’s the stance of someone who mistakes deflation for wisdom. Lewis proposes a third option: lucidity without contempt. It’s an ethics of attention, where acknowledging flaws doesn’t cancel tenderness.

Context matters: Lewis, writing out of a Christian moral imagination and personal experience of late, complicated love, treats love less as a feeling than as a discipline. The paradox does the rhetorical work. “Seeing through” usually implies exposure, the end of illusion; he flips it into endurance. Love’s power is not denial but a deliberate refusal to let clarity curdle into dismissal. In an era that rewards the hot take and the exit, Lewis frames staying as the more difficult, more radical act.