Inspiration and advice from C.S Lewis

...the belief of ignorant humans, that there is no hope of getting rid of temptation except by yielding...
(From "The Screwtape Letters")
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I would like to share some quotes from my favorite author on resisting temptation and lust, which have helped me many a time after a relapse.
I know the internet is filled with short quotes of his, but I'm digging a bit deeper here, so maybe you'll find something new and useful here.
Hope this helps you as much as it helped me, God bless!

After relapse:
You must ask for God’s help.
Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind.

After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again.
Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still.
It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God.

We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.
The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection.
(From "Mere Christianity")

....Despair is a greater sin than any of the sins which provoke it....
(From "The Screwtape Letters")

...No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue ... but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation.
(From "The Screwtape Letters")



About masturbation:
For me the real evil of masturbation would be that it... ...sends the man back into the prison of himself, there to keep a harem of imaginary brides.

And this harem, once admitted, works against his ever getting out and really uniting with a real woman.
For the harem is always accessible, always subservient, calls for no sacrifices or adjustments, and can be endowed with erotic and psychological attractions which no real woman can rival.
Among those shadowy brides he is always adored, always the perfect lover: no demand is made on his unselfishness, no mortification ever imposed on his vanity.

In the end, they become merely the medium through which he increasingly adores himself...

...Masturbation involves this abuse of imagination in erotic matters (which I think bad in itself) and thereby encourages a similar abuse of it in all spheres.
After all, almost the main work of life is to come out of our selves, out of the little, dark prison we are all born in. Masturbation is to be avoided as all things are to be avoided which retard this process.

The danger is that of coming to love the prison.
(Letters to Malcom)

(I did trim the long quotes a bit to make them easier to read, so if you are interested in the whole paragraph you should search for it yourself.)​

 

Wow, thank you, I totally forgot about this book... Reading that passage again gave me shivers : )