We are not living in a world where all roads are radii of a circle and where all, if followed long enough, will therefore draw gradually nearer and finally meet at the centre: rather in a world where every road, after a few miles, forks into two, and each of those into two again, and at each fork, you must make a decision.
— C. S. Lewis
'The Lion' all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, 'Let's try to make a story about it.'
History isn't just the story of bad people doing bad things. It's quite as much a story of people trying to do good things. But somehow, something goes wrong.
What I call my 'self' now is hardly a person at all. It's mainly a meeting place for various natural forces, desires, and fears, etcetera, some of which come from my ancestors, and some from my education, some perhaps from devils. The self you were really intended to be is something that lives not from nature but from God.
We must show our Christian colors if we are to be true to Jesus Christ.
Writing is like a 'lust,' or like 'scratching when you itch.' Writing comes as a result of a very strong impulse, and when it does come, I, for one, must get it out.
If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
Long before history began we men have got together apart from the women and done things. We had time.
Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, 'Thy will be done,' and those to whom God says, 'All right, then, have it your way.'
Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
We all want progress, but if you're 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.
We are what we believe we are.
It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one.
I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.
Satan, the leader or dictator of devils, is the opposite, not of God, but of Michael.
I'm tall, fat, rather bald, red-faced, double-chinned, black-haired, have a deep voice, and wear glasses for reading.
Nothing is more dangerous to one's own faith than the work of an apologist. No doctrine of that faith seems to me so spectral, so unreal as one that I have just successfully defended in a public debate.
Solemnity is proper in church, but things that are proper in church are not necessarily proper outside, and vice versa. For example, I can say a prayer while washing my teeth, but that does not mean I should wash my teeth in church.
Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere.
Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.
The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities.
You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.
Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare.
There is no uncreated being except God. God has no opposite.
Joy is the serious business of Heaven.
Real joy seems to me almost as unlike security or prosperity as it is unlike agony.
Some people write heavily, some write lightly. I prefer the light approach because I believe there is a great deal of false reverence about. There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.
'Good English' is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another.
There is, hidden or flaunted, a sword between the sexes till an entire marriage reconciles them.
What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.
I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for joy.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.
Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete.
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
