To get even near humility, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.

I have seen something like it happen in battle. A man was coming at me, I at him, to kill. Then came a sudden great gust of wind that wrapped out cloaks over our swords and almost over our eyes, so that we could do nothing to one another but must fight the wind itself. And that ridiculous contention, so foreign to the business we were on, set us both laughing, face to face - friends for a moment - and then at once enemies again and forever.

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.

It doesn't really matter whether you grip the arms of the dentist's chair or let your hands lie in your lap. The drill drills on.

I do not think that all who choose wrong roads perish; but their rescue consists in being put back on the right road.

By gum,' said Digory, 'Don't I just wish I was big enough to punch your head!

Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.