'Being in love' first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise.
C. S. LewisVery often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.
C. S. LewisOur merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously - no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner - no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment.
C. S. Lewis