C. S. Lewis Quotes About Morality

• 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

• Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.

  C. S. Lewis

  Teacher, Morality, Introducing

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.77, HarperCollins UK

• Morality is a mountain which we cannot climb by our own efforts; and if we could we should only perish in the ice and unbreathable air of the summit, lacking those wings with which the rest of the journey has to be accomplished. For it is from there that the real ascent begins. The ropes and axes are 'done away' and the rest is a matter of flying.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Journey, Air

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.122, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• While we are actually subjected to them, the 'moods' and 'spirits' of nature point no morals. Overwhelming gaiety, insupportable grandeur, sombre desolation are flung at you. Make what you can of them, if you must make at all. The only imperative that nature utters is, 'Look. Listen. Attend.

  C. S. Lewis

  Nature, Looks, Spirit

  C. S. Lewis (1971). “The Four Loves”, p.31, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.... The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

  C. S. Lewis

  Teacher, Horse, Jobs

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.77, HarperCollins UK

• In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.

  C. S. Lewis

  Running, Reality, Machines

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.11, Simon and Schuster

• Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?

  C. S. Lewis

  Honesty, Men, Thinking

• The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

  C. S. Lewis

  Law, Play, Keys

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.10, Harper Collins

• The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike...Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish.

  C. S. Lewis

  Law, Ideas, Atheism

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.36, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

  C. S. Lewis

  Ideas, Savages, Would Be

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.13, Harper Collins

• 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

• Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Giving, Essentials

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.143, Simon and Schuster

• There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.

  C. S. Lewis

  Law, Nails, Morality

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.40, HarperCollins UK

• Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Facts, Morality

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “The Problem of Pain”, p.11, HarperCollins UK

• 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

• One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.

  C. S. Lewis

  Cutting, Law, Humanity

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Independent, Thinking

  C. S. Lewis (2012). “The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics”, p.28, HarperCollins UK

• Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.

  C. S. Lewis

  Taken, Burden Of Proof, Morality

  C. S. Lewis, Michael Ward (2017). “The Abolition of Man: C.S. Lewis’s Classic Essay on Objective Morality: A Critical Edition by Michael Ward”, p.59, TellerBooks

• The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

  C. S. Lewis

  Reality, Morality, Pretending

• There is only one way fit for a man - Heroism, or Master-Morality, or Violence. All the other people in between are ploughing the sand.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, People, Heroism

  "The Pilgrim's Regress". Book by C. S. Lewis, p. 100, 1933.

• The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Men, Firsts

  C. S. Lewis (1952). “Mere Christianity: a revised and enlarged edition, with a new introduction, of the three books, The case for Christianity, Christian behaviour, and Beyond personality”, Scribner Paper Fiction

• Christian theology can fit in science, art, morality, and the sub-Christian religious. The scientific point of view cannot fit any of these things, not even science itself.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Religious, Art

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