Nature & Animals Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis doesn’t beg you to self-improve; he corners you with biology. The egg metaphor is ruthless because it strips away the modern comfort of “growth” as an endless, low-stakes lifestyle choice. An egg is either on its way to becoming something else, or it’s quietly spoiling. No neutral option, no tasteful stasis.

The line works by exposing the fantasy of consequence-free spiritual dabbling. “Learn to fly while remaining an egg” skewers the desire to claim the payoff of transformation without paying the cost of change. Lewis aims at a very specific middle-class temptation: to remain “ordinary” and “decent” and assume decency is a destination rather than a threshold. The adjective is doing a lot of work. “Decent” sounds safe, socially approved, even morally sufficient. Lewis implies it can also be a hiding place, a way to confuse respectability with renewal.

Context matters: Lewis is writing as a Christian apologist in a 20th-century Britain where faith is competing with secular modernity and polite religiosity alike. The metaphor insists Christianity is not an accessory to an already-functional self; it’s a claim that re-makes the self. “We must be hatched or go bad” is theological, but it’s also a cultural critique of comfortable compromise: a warning that postponing inner change isn’t neutrality, it’s decay. The urgency isn’t panic; it’s inevitability.