C. S. Lewis Quotes

I think that moral philosophy is useful for framing questions, but terrible at answering them. I think moral psychology is booming right now, and we're making a lot of progress on understanding how we actually work, what our moral nature is.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.

I worry that when you start quoting Machiavelli to justify your actions, you have ceased to be one of the good guys. No, quoting Nietzsche does that. Machiavelli is just cool.

It is better to will the good than to know the truth.

Moralism doesn't produce morality; it produces immorality.

Tolerance cannot afford to have anything to do with the fallacy that evil may convert itself to good.

You can't slice up morals.

A wrongdoing doesn't give us the right to do wrong.

People are either good or they're not. Religion doesn't make anybody good, I don't think.

For a good cause, wrongdoing is virtuous.

Moral philosophy is nothing else but the science of what is good, and evil, in the conversation, and society of mankind. Good, and evil, are names that signify our appetites, and aversions; which in different tempers, customs, and doctrines of men, are different.

We care about moral issues, nobility, decency, happiness, goodness—the issues that matter in the real world, but which can only be addressed, in their purity, in fiction.

If one must do a wrong, it's best to do it pursuing power-otherwise, let's have virtue.

Man is naturally self-centered and he is inclined to regard expediency as the supreme standard for what is right and wrong. However, we must not convert an inclination into an axiom that just as man's perceptions cannot operate outside time and space, so his motivations cannot operate outside expediency; that man can never transcend his own self. The most fatal trap into which thinking may fall is the equation of existence and expediency.

To be good, and to do good, is all we have to do.

What is the real relation between happiness and goodness? It is only within a few generations that men have found courage to say that there is none.

I can only say that, while my own opinions as to ethics do not satisfy me, other people's satisfy me still less.

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Morality is the Science of harmonious relations between intelligent beings.

Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.

Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason of itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.

One’s concern with the ethics of means and ends varies inversely with one’s personal interest in the issue.

That we occasionally violate our own stated moral code does not imply that we are insincere in espousing that code.

One of the great tragedies of mankind is that morality has been hijacked by religion. So now people assume that religion and morality have a necessary connection. But the basis of morality is really very simple and doesn't require religion at all.