C. S. Lewis Quotes About Virtue

• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.

  C. S. Lewis

  Courage, Army, Bravery

  In Cyril Connolly 'The Unquiet Grave' (1944) ch. 31

• After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us toward is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity (or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue) may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the one hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hands, Always Trying, Soul

• 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

• We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Laughing, Honor

  "Don't mock Tim Tebow" by William J. Bennett, www.cnn.com. December 6, 2011.

• 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

• Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Always Trying, Firsts, Helping

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Teacher, Inspiration

• To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Children, Men

• Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.

  C. S. Lewis

  Humble, Humility, Pride

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.153, Simon and Schuster

• You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.

  C. S. Lewis

  Always Trying, Long, Mind

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Virtue, Chastity

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.127, Simon and Schuster

• Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Light, Fog

  C. S. Lewis (1984). “The Business of Heaven: Daily Readings from C. S. Lewis”, p.89, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. […] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.[…]The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Humility, Pride

• Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty or mercy which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.

  C. S. Lewis

  Courage, Honesty, Hypocrite

  In Cyril Connolly 'The Unquiet Grave' (1944) ch. 31

• 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

• He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles.

  C. S. Lewis

  Hands, Vices, Want

  C. S. Lewis (2013). “The Screwtape Letters: Annotated Edition”, p.36, Harper Collins

• Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

  C. S. Lewis

  School, Men, Good Man

• And all the time - such is the tragic comedy of our situation - we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Laughing, Honor

  "The Abolition of Man". Book by C. S. Lewis, 1943.

• Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world as it is. If you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Mean, Thinking

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Joyful Christian”, p.138, Simon and Schuster

• If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old he would have replied, Love - You see what has happened? A negative term has been substituted for a positive, and this is of more than philological importance. The negative ideal of Unselfishness carries with it the suggestion not primarily of securing good things for others, but of going without them ourselves, as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Love You, Men

• There is something which unites magic and applied science (technology) while separating them from the "wisdom" of earlier ages. For the wise men of old, the cardinal problem of human life was how to conform the soul to objective reality, and the solution was wisdom, self-discipline , and virtue. For the modern, the cardinal problem is how to conform reality to the wishes of man, and the solution is a technique.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wise, Reality, Men

• Humility, after the first shock, is cheerful virtue.

  C. S. Lewis

  Humility, Cheerful, Firsts

• All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.

  C. S. Lewis

  Heart, Men, Doors

  C. S. LEWIS (1961). “The Screwtape Letters & Screwtape Proposes a Toast”

• My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to 'rejoice' as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue.

  C. S. Lewis

  Sadness, Humility, Thinking

• It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

  C. S. Lewis

  Wisdom, Men, Virtue

  C. S. LEWIS (1947). “THE ABOLITION OF MAN”

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