C. S. Lewis Quotes

With certain rapturous exceptions, literature is the moral life.

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

Sportsmanship, next to the Church, is the greatest teacher of morals.

Never stray from the Way.

All the good of which humanity is capable is comprised in obedience.

Many men can no more be kept straight by spiritual motives than we can live without policemen.

You don't luck into integrity. You work at it.

There are many objects of desire, and therefore many desires. Some are born with us, hunger, yearning, and pride of place, and some are of the foolishness of the world, such as the desire to eat off silver plates. Desire is a wild horse to be tamed. Virtue is habit long continued. The taming of desire is like the training of an athlete. Discipline is not the restraint but the use of energy.

The Bible improved my ethical IQ. I started to act like a good person. I tried not to gossip, and lie, and covet, and just by pretending I was a good person, I think I actually became a little bit better of a person. I'm not Gandhi or Angelina Jolie, but it was a baby step.

[Moralistic] novels are at the same disadvantage as teachers: children never believe them, because they make everything that happens relate to the lesson at hand.

Discipline our youth in early life in sound maxims of moral, political, and religious duties.

He that loses his conscience has nothing left that is worth keeping. Therefore be sure you look to that, and in the next place look to your health; and if you have it, praise God and value it next to a good conscience.

Exhort your household to learn [the Ten Commandments] word for word, that they should obey God…For if you teach and urge your families things will go forward.

That's the thing about a folk tale: It is always addressing incredibly key issues about how you should live and what the right thing to do is, which is really what I'm the most interested in - like the questions that religion takes on. And I think that, for those of us that aren't religious, we need, or I need, art that stimulates the same kind of thinking about what it is to be a mensch, or a good man, things like that.

Obedience is the crown and honour of all virtue.

Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian of what it commands; and is the only sure defence of happiness.

Clergymen almost necessarily fail in two ways as teachers of morals. They condemn acts which do no harm and they condone acts which do great harm.

Curb your talent lest it speed where virtue does not guide.

People may talk about intellectual teaching, but what we principally want is the moral teaching.

I feel like I have always played within the rules. I would never break the rules.

The primary goal in the education of children is to teach, and to give the example of, a virtuous life.

What is all wisdom save a collection of platitudes? But the man who orders his life according to their teachings cannot go far wrong.

Goodness shapes our will, and truth shapes our understanding.

I have always tried to have a message, not to be a preacher, but a message that shows it's better to be a good guy than a bad guy, and I try to make it clear that doing the right thing is more attractive than not.