 The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys. |
Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position.
Source: The Abolition of Man |
| The very idea of freedom presupposes some objective moral law which overarches rulers and ruled alike. Unless we return to the crude and nursery-like belief in objective values, we perish. |
Morality or duty never yet made a man happy in himself or dear to others.
Source: English Literature in the 16th Century |
There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft.
Source: Mere Christianity |
Morality, like numinous awe, is a jump; in it, man goes beyond anything that can be 'given' in the facts of experience.
Source: The Problem of Pain |
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All men alike stand condemned, not by alien codes of ethics, but by their own, and all men therefore are conscious of guilt.
Source: The Problem of Pain |
One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.
Source: The Problem of Pain |
| The standard that measures two things is something different from either. You are, in fact, comparing them both with some Real Morality, admitting that there is such a thing as a real Right, independent of what people think, and that some people's ideas get nearer to that real Right than others. |
| In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. |
| Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. |
