C. S. Lewis Quotes

The virtue involved in helping those one loves is not 'selflessness' or 'sacrifice,' but integrity.

The virtuous man is driven by responsibility, the non-virtuous man is driven by profit.

Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

If you real desire is to be good, there is no need to wait for the money before you do it; you can do it now, this very moment, and just where you are.

It is by doing good that we become good.

Integrity is not about the action but its purpose. Are you doing it for everyone's wellbeing or for your own benefit?

He, who practices right, but in the hope of acquiring great renown, is very near to vice.

You love people, not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for their values; their virtues.

It is of the essence of virtue that the good is not to be done for the sake of a reward.

Virtue cannot be followed but for herself, and if one sometimes borrows her mask to some other purpose, she presently pulls it away again.

Virtue is its own reward. We only invented concepts like heaven and hell to describe how we feel. We don't feel good doing bad and it's nice to help someone.

No one can be good for long if goodness is not in demand.

I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good.

What, pray, does it profit a man to teach others, and to be prating always about virtue, in high-sounding words, if he fails to give heed to his own instructions?

Reason perhaps teaches certain bourgeois virtues, but it does not make either heroes or saints.

The ages of greatest public spirit are not always eminent for private virtue.

I have often thought that if a well-grounded affection be not really a part of virtue, it is something extremely akin to it.

People don't just want to be rich and successful, they want to be good.

Being a 'good man' is something you do, not something you are.

Good people do fundamental work because they believe in the work.

In today's society, looking good and feeling good often trumps doing good and being good. And some people don't know the difference anymore.

There will be people who will teach for the sake of greed or for the sake of ego. So watch their lives. Do they look and act like Jesus?

We should make virtue our master, not our servant.

To do evil for good is human corruption; to do good for good is civil retribution; but to do good for evil is Christian perfection. Though this be not the grace of nature, it is the nature of grace.