C. S. Lewis Quotes

Our virtues are most frequently but vices disguised.

People who act like angels ought to have angels to deal with.

There are pretenders to piety as well as to courage.

Demagoguery from the pulpit is no different from demagoguery on the campaign trail. If anything, it is worse, because it clothes itself in self-righteousness.

There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.

The deepest sins are camouflaged as holiness.

Goodness that preaches undoes itself.

Beware of the virtue which a man boasts is his.

Forgive! How many will say, forgive, and find a sort of absolution in the sound to hate a little longer!

You're so earnest about morality that I hate to think how essentially immoral you must be underneath.

Virtue sometimes pretends. Vice is always sincere.

You smile with pomp and rigor, you talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with benevolence and virtue and get murdered time after time.

One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.

I believe with the best of who I am in God, but I sometimes think if anybody would watch me and [they] didn't believe a damn thing, they would have a very hard time deciding which of us is which.

Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.

And what sort of lives do these people, who pose as being moral, lead themselves? My dear fellow, you forget that we are in the native land of the hypocrite.

Hypocrisy is a fashionable vice, and all fashionable vices pass for virtue.

What we take for virtue is often nothing but an assemblage of different actions, and of different interests, that fortune or our industry knows how to arrange.

Hypocrisy is nothing, in fact, but a horrible hopefulness.

God save us always,' I said 'from the innocent and the good.

No vice exists which does not pretend to be more or less like some virtue, and which does not take advantage of this assumed resemblance.

The Devil may also make use of morality.

Virtue by calculation is the virtue of vice.

Hypocrisy is the necessary burden of villainy.