"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."

"With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere. "


"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who is merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours.

You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.

You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.

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.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.


Certainly this most honest and lucid of men was not a liar or a lunatic. He said “I am the way, and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father, but through Me” (John 14:6). Either it was true, or he was lying, or he was insane. As C.S. Lewis so brilliantly demonstrated, there are no other alternatives.