C. S. Lewis Quotes About Duty

• Remember He is the artist and you are only the picture. You can't see it. So quietly submit to be painted---i.e., keep fulfilling all the obvious duties of your station (you really know quite well enough what they are!), asking forgiveness for each failure and then leaving it alone.You are in the right way. Walk---don't keep on looking at it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Trust, Artist, Leaving

• Never, in peace or war, commit your virtue or your happiness to the future. Happy work is best done by the man who takes his long-term plans somewhat lightly and works from moment to moment 'as to the Lord.' It is only our daily bread that we are encouraged to ask for. The present is the only time in which any duty can be done or any grace received.

  C. S. Lewis

  War, Men, Long

• Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

  C. S. Lewis

  Country, Thinking, Mirrors

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works”, p.17, Harper Collins

• I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Thinking, Sick

• Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Grief, Talking

  C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.14, Faber & Faber

• I have no duty to be anyone's Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Philosophy, Men

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.83, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The present is the only time in which any duty may be done or grace received.

  C. S. Lewis

  Time, Grace, Done

• I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life's short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily

  C. S. Lewis

  Filling Up, Hours, Enough

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Collected Letters Volume Three: Narnia, Cambridge and Joy 1950–1963”, p.96, HarperCollins UK

• Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Rights, Differences

• The real trouble about the duty of forgiveness is that you do it with all your might on Monday and then find on Wednesday that it hasn't stayed put and all has to be done over again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Monday, Real, Peer Pressure

• Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Morality, Made

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.41, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Temperance referred not abstaining, but going the right length and no further...of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Strong, Drinking

• A perfect man would never act from a sense of duty; he’d always want the right thing more than the wrong one. Duty is only a substitute for love (of God and of other people) like a crutch which is a substitute for a leg. Most of us need the crutch at times; but of course it is idiotic to use the crutch when our own legs (our own loves, tastes, habits etc.) can do the journey on their own.

  C. S. Lewis

  Journey, Men, People

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.142, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

  C. S. Lewis

  Religious, Feelings, Doubt

• And that's why, gentleman, if your little girl doesn't come up to scratch, it will be our painful duty to cut all your throats. Merely in a way of business, as you might say, and no offense, I hope.

  C. S. Lewis

  Girl, Cutting, Gentleman

• To interest is the first duty of art; no other excellences will ever begin to compensate for failure in this.

  C. S. Lewis

  Art, Excellence, Firsts

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “Selected Literary Essays”, p.103, Cambridge University Press

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