Happy Virtue, Painful Surrender

"We therefore agree with Aristotle that what is intrinsically right may well be agreeable, and that the better a man is the more he will like it; but we agree with Kant so far as to say that there is one right act - that of self-surrender - which cannot be willed to the height by fallen creatures unless it is unpleasant."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 90

Kindness Trumps the Virtues?

"If, then, you are tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane - if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground - ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of cruel ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 57

Kindness Among the Virtues

"We have so concentrated on one of the virtues - 'kindness' or mercy - that most of us do not feel anything except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. ... The real trouble is that 'kindness' is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds."

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain p. 50

Virtue: Found and Left Untried

"What gave adults the cheer to tolerate their hypocrisy? Even his mother praised generosity and hoarded; she preached industry and barely worked. Perhaps every generation passes to the next, to hand down to yet more children, an untouched trunk of virtues. The adults describe the trunk's contents to the young and never open it."

Annie Dillard in The Maytrees p. 96