C. S. Lewis Quotes

There is no true and abiding morality that is not founded in religion.

Morality must always precede and accompany religion, and yet religion is much more than morality.

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds - and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe.

Let us with caution indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion. Reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle.

I believe there is meaning in life. I believe there is good and evil.

Morality is always derivative. It stems from one's worldview.

If the Coastal Republic had believed in the existence of virtue, it could at least have aspired to hypocrisy.

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.

All good moral philosophy is ... but the handmaid to religion.

A moral choice in its basic terms appears to be a choice that favors survival: a choice made in favor of life.

Right and wrong are not the product of census.

He that has not religion to govern his morality, is not a dram better than my mastiff-dog; so long as you stroke him, and please him, and do not pinch him, he will play with you as finely as may be, he is a very good moral mastiff; but if you hurt him, he will fly in your face, and tear out your throat.

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

Religion is not just incongruent with morality, but in essential ways incompatible with it.

Morality may exist in an atheist without any religion, and in a theist with a religion quite unspiritual.

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

Values reduce to facts about the well-being of conscious creatures.

Tis certain that Morality is an indispensable Requisite of true Religion, and there can be none without it. But it would become the Pride and Ignorance of Pagans only, to magnify it, as the Whole of what is necessary.

Morality is either a social contract or you have to pay cash.

On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, 'one of the weightiest concepts man has ever formed,' once a dogma, in the course of time a hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction, yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken.

Morality has nothing in common with politics.

Morality is truth in full bloom.

We talk so much about one's rights... so little about what is actually right.

Renunciation is the very basis upon which ethics stands. There never was an ethical code preached which had not renunciation for its basis.

To say murder is wrong is as much a statement of faith as 'I believe that God said murder is wrong' is a statement of faith