C. S. Lewis Quotes About Ethics

• The very power of [textbook writers] depends on the fact that they are dealing with a boy: a boy who thinks he is ‘doing’ his ‘English prep’ and has no notion that ethics, theology, and politics are all at stake. It is not a theory they put into his mind, but an assumption, which ten years hence, its origin forgotten and its presence unconscious, will condition him to take one side in a controversy which he has never recognized as a controversy at all.

  C. S. Lewis

  Boys, Thinking, Years

• No justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Animal, Men

• In justifying cruelty to animals we put ourselves also on the animal level. We choose the jungle and must abide by our choice.

  C. S. Lewis

  Animal, Choices, Pet

• All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Guilt, Code Of Ethics

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.44, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Is it easy to love God' asks an old author. 'It is easy,' he replies, 'to those who do it.' I have included two Graces under the word Charity. But God can give a third. He can awake in man, towards Himself, a supernatural Appreciative love. This is of all gifts the most to be desired. Here, not in our natural loves, nor even in ethics, lies the true centre of all human and angelic life. With this all things are possible.

  C. S. Lewis

  Lying, Men, Two

• The Guide sang:
  The new age, the new art, the new ethic and thought,
  And fools crying,
  Because it has begun It will continue as it has begun!
  The wheel runs fast, therefore the wheel will run
  Faster for ever,
  The old age is done,
  We have new lights and see without the sun.
  (Though they lay flat the mountains and dry up the sea,
  Wilt thou yet change, as though God were a god?)

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Art, Light

  "The Pilgrim's Regress". Book by C. S. Lewis, pp. 186-187, 1933.

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