Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ālive up toā the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of timeāwhile your friend hesitates for a wordāwhat things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly factsāthe meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurityābut the tone is false. The very act of confessingāan infinitesimally hypocritical glanceāa dash of humourāall this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are exceptional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtuesālike the bad tennis player who calls his normal form his ābad daysā and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that isĀ inside.
C. S. Lewis, "The Problem Of Pain" (source: quotescite)
