We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.
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.
I was with book, as a woman is with child.
But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan.
Nothing is yet in its true form.
You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.
A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.
Do not dare not to dare.
I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.
Isn’t it funny how day by day nothing changes, but when you look back, everything is different...
It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird 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.
Oh, Adam’s sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!
Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.
The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning.