C. S. Lewis Quotes

I got fed up with the human race, really. I got a very negative feeling about human potentials. And for a while, I thought I might write a book without any human beings in it whatsoever.

The heart of man will always be dark. There will always be evil people. The problem is that there is nothing we can humanly do to change them.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active - not more happy - nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Man has gone long enough, or even too long, without being man enough to face the simple truth that the trouble with man is man.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.

Man has demonstrated that he is master of everything except his own nature.

It is quite true, as some poets said, that the God who created man must have had a sinister sense of humor, creating him a reasonable being, yet forcing him to take this ridiculous posture, and driving him with blind craving for this ridiculous performance.

Man's world is the planet of inexperience.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Man is still the greatest miracle and the greatest problem on this earth.

Man's biological weakness is the condition of human culture.

I do have faith. I don't have faith that a God exists, nor do I have faith that one does not; I have absolute faith that I do not know, cannot know, am only human, am an infinitesimal creature packed onto a cramped planet crowded with seven billion bodies, and as many yearning hearts, and as many questioning minds.

Because we're human beings, we're not always going to be perfect.

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

Human fallibility recognised, God's sovereignty trusted; these are also the only stable foundations for human beings in society.

I'm totally human.

Two things in America are astonishing: the changeableness of most human behavior and the strange stability of certain principles. Men are constantly on the move, but the spirit of humanity seems almost unmoved.

Of our relation to all creation we can never know anything whatsoever. All is immensity and chaos. But, since all this knowledge of our limitations cannot possibly be of any value to us, it is better to ignore it in our daily conduct of life.

I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.

There are things you have to look at with those world-class players, but at the end of the day, they're not superheroes. They're still human.

Unfortunately I am a human being and not a robot.

Yes, I do believe that human beings are not perfect.

Man is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely constant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

The meaningless absurdity of life is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to man.