C. S. Lewis Quotes About Morality
-
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
→ -
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.
→ -
Is there a difference between a man who thinks that honesty is the best policy, and an honest man?
→ -
Giving to the poor is an essential part of Christian morality.
→ -
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.
→ -
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
→ -
Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.
→ -
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.
→ -
The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.
→ -
One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Timothy Keller Author -
Georgie Henley Film actress -
Evelyn Waugh Writer -
Lucy Maud Montgomery Author -
J. R. R. Tolkien Writer -
Charles Dickens Writer -
Joy Davidman Poet -
T. S. Eliot Playwright -
H. G. Wells Writer -
J. K. Rowling Novelist -
George MacDonald Author -
Skandar Keynes Actor -
Stephen King Author -
Gilbert K. Chesterton Writer -
Douglas Gresham Film actor -
Cassandra Clare Author -
Lewis Carroll Writer -
George R. R. Martin Novelist -
George Eliot Novelist -
Aldous Huxley Writer