C. S. Lewis Quotes

We usually know what we can do, but temptation shows us who we are.

There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.

Who has a harder fight than he who is striving to overcome himself.

When our vices leave us, we like to imagine it is we who are leaving them.

Good people struggle against what's imperfect about them. The people that we call 'bad' people embrace that kind of stuff, embrace the darker side.

God is better served in resisting a temptation to evil than in many formal prayers.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

It is good to be without vices, but it is not good to be without temptations.

Virtue is a state of war, and to live in it we have always to combat with ourselves.

We make ourselves a ladder out of our vices if we trample the vices themselves underfoot.

Well, any time you do anything good, it's man versus himself, right? That's the art, the challenge.

There's a victory, and defeat; the first and best of victories, the lowest and worst of defeats which each man gains or sustains at the hands not of another, but of himself.

Virtue is insufficient temptation.

Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

'Tis one thing to be tempted, another thing to fall.

Respect for self is the beginning of cultivating virtue in men and women.

The literature of the inner life is very largely a record of struggle with the inordinate passions of the social self.

Virtue is a positive quality developed by taking a firm stand for the right in temptation, or by the suffering endured in consequence of wrongdoing.

We may not have demon fathers dangling offers of infernal power before us, but everyone understands what it means to struggle with temptation or resist the urge to give in to our baser natures.

The great of heart is a gift of god. He who obeys his belly, obeys the enemy

It's easy to point out the evil in other people, but that can be found in all of us. That selfishness, that is something we all have in us. Sometimes you are successful at dealing with it, and sometimes you are not.

The hardest victory is the victory over self.

It is easy enough to be virtuous When nothing tempts you to stray; When without or within No voice of sin Is luring your soul away. But it is only a negative virtue until it is tried by fire. For the soul that is worth the treasures of the earth is the soul that resists desire.

Reflect upon the defects of your character: thoroughly realize their evils and the transient pleasures they give you, and firmly will that you shall try your best not to yield to them the next time.

There isn't any virtue where there has never been any temptation.