C. S. Lewis Quotes About Humanity

• Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.

  C. S. Lewis

  True Love, Famous Love, Falling In Love

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.37, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

• Human beings look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then we are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well, and when they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing--rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mother, Father, Past

• The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There is not one of them which will not make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it is not. If you leave out justice you will find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity", and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Thinking, Justice

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.22, HarperCollins UK

• To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is 'remains.'

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Heaven, Humanity

• God can show Himself as He really is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in one band, or organs in one body.

  C. S. Lewis

  Real, Mean, Player

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

• God descends to re-ascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity ... down to the very roots and sea-bed of the nature He has created. But He goes down to come up again and bring the ruined world up with Him.

  C. S. Lewis

  Sea, Roots, Space

• Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

  C. S. Lewis

  Moving, Leaving, Humanity

  1936 The Allegory of Love, ch.1.

• Non-Christians seem to think that the Incarnation implies some particular merit or excellence in humanity. But of course it implies just the reverse: a particular demerit and depravity. No creature that deserved Redemption would need to be redeemed. They that are whole need not the physician. Christ died for men precisely because men are not worth dying for; to make them worth it.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Men, Thinking

  C. S. Lewis (2002). “The World's Last Night: And Other Essays”, p.94, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Happiness, Mean, Men

• My own eyes are not enough for me...I will see through the eyes of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many is not enough...I will see what others have invented. Even the eyes of all humanity are not enough. I regret that the brutes cannot write books. Very gladly would I learn what face things present to a mouse or a bee. More gladly still would I perceive the olfactory world charged with all the information and emotion it carries for a dog.

  C. S. Lewis

  Dog, Nature, Regret

• Thus the criminal ceases to be a person, a subject of rights and duties, and becomes merely an object on which society can work. And this is, in principle, how Hitler treated the Jews. They were objects; killed not for ill desert but because, on his theories, they were a disease in society. If society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.

  C. S. Lewis

  Men, Rights, Differences

• One of the most dangerous errors is that civilization is automatically bound to increase and spread. The lesson of history is the opposite; civilization is a rarity, attained with difficulty and easily lost. The normal state of humanity is barbarism, just as the normal surface of the planet is salt water. Land looms large in our imagination and civilization in history books, only because sea and savagery are to us less interesting.

  C. S. Lewis

  Book, Errors, Sea

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “Image and Imagination”, p.14, Harper Collins

• One can regard the moral law as an illusion, and so cut himself off from the common ground of humanity.

  C. S. Lewis

  Cutting, Law, Humanity

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.48, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• Redeemed humanity is still young, it has hardly come to its full strength. But already there is joy enough in the little finger of a great saint such as yonder lady to waken all the dead things of the universe into life.

  C. S. Lewis

  Joy, Humanity, Saint

• If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would look like one single growing thing-rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.

  C. S. Lewis

  Tree, Humanity, Looks

  C.S. Lewis (1960). “Mere Christianity”

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