C. S. Lewis - Man Quotes

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The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to teach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right.

C. S. Lewis
If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary.

C. S. Lewis
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.

C. S. Lewis
To live his life in his own way, to call his house his castle, to enjoy the fruits of his own labour, to educate his children as his conscience directs, to save for their prosperity after his death -- these are wishes deeply ingrained in civilised man. Their realization is almost as necessary to our virtues as to our happiness. From their total frustration disastrous results both moral and psychological might follow.

C. S. Lewis
All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.

C. S. Lewis
It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous.

C. S. Lewis
A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.

C. S. Lewis
A sick society must think much about politics, as a sick man must think much about his digestion.

C. S. Lewis
To fight in another man's armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.

C. S. Lewis
You weren't a decent man and you didn't do your best. We none of us were and none of us did.

C. S. Lewis
All the delights of sense, or heart, or intellect, with which you could once have tempted him, even the delights of virtue itself, now seem to him in comparison but as the half nauseous attractions of a raddled harlot would seem to a man who hears that his true beloved whom he has loved all his life and whom he had believed to be dead is alive and even now at his door.

C. S. Lewis
Friendship, I have said, is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself..."

C. S. Lewis
We all want progress. But progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man.

C. S. Lewis
The student is half afraid to meet one of the great philosophers face to face. He feels himself inadequate and thinks he will not understand him. But if he only knew, the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator. The simplest student will be able to understand, if not all, yet a very great deal of what Plato said; but hardly anyone can understand some modern books on Platonism.

C. S. Lewis
All the time the joke is that the word "mine" in its fully possessive sense cannot be uttered by a human being about anything. In the long run either [Satan] or God will say "mine" of each thing that exists, and specially of each man.

C. S. Lewis
I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.

C. S. Lewis
For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means... the power of some men to make other men what THEY please.

C. S. Lewis
Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.

C. S. Lewis
God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

C. S. Lewis
When once a man is launched on such an adventure as this, he must bid farewell to hopes and fears, otherwise death or deliverance will both come too late to save his honor and his reason. Ho, my beauties!

C. S. Lewis
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.

C. S. Lewis
Friendship is the greatest of worldly goods. Certainly to me it is the chief happiness of life. If I had to give a piece of advice to a young man about a place to live, I think I shd. say, 'sacrifice almost everything to live where you can be near your friends.'

C. S. Lewis
There is hope for a man who has never read Malory or Boswell or Tristam Shandy or Shakespeare's Sonnets: but what can you do with a man who says he "has read" them, meaning he has read them once, and thinks that this settles the matter?

C. S. Lewis
The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.

C. S. Lewis
The higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.

C. S. Lewis
No man who values originality will ever be original. But try to tell the truth as you see it, try to do any bit of work as well as it can be done for the work's sake, and what men call originality will come unsought..

C. S. Lewis
No man who says, 'I'm as good as you,' believes it. He would not say it if he did.

C. S. Lewis
The central miracle asserted by Christians is the incarnation. They say that God became man.

C. S. Lewis
A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works: indeed, he certainly would not know how it works until he has accepted it.

C. S. Lewis
A man may have to die for our country: but no man must, in any exclusive sense, live for his country. He who surrenders himself without reservation to the temporal claims of a nation, or a party, or a class is rendering to Caesar that which, of all things, most emphatically belongs to God: himself.

C. S. Lewis