“The perfect way is only difficult for those who pick and choose. Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. Make a hairbreadth difference and heaven and earth are set apart; if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between “for” and “against” is the mind’s worst disease.”

“Give full attention to what you do. If you give a rapt attention to what you do, you can have what you could have done in 3 hours well completed within 2 hours or less. Concentration is the key word.”

“An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

“Good character going bad is like a beast escaping it's cage; it will be hard to capture it again!”

“In many homes and among so-called educated people—it has become fashionable to joke about the Bible and to regard it more as a dust-catcher than as the living Word of God.”

“The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. You will be one of the sound craftsmen, and other sound craftsmen will know it. This group of craftsmen will by no means coincide with the Inner Ring or the Important People or the People in the Know. It will not shape that professional policy or work up that professional influence which fights for the profession as a whole against the public: nor will it lead to those periodic scandals and crises which the Inner Ring produces. But it will do those things which that profession exists to do and will in the long run be responsible for all the respect which that profession in fact enjoys and which the speeches and advertisements cannot maintain. And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the center of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring. But the difference is that its secrecy is accidental, and its exclusiveness a by-product, and no one was led thither by the lure of the esoteric: for it is only four or five people who like one another meeting to do things that they like. This is friendship. Aristotle placed it among the virtues. It causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.”

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

“A little muzhik was working on the railroad, mumbling in his beard.

“No, world! You are not going to do this to me any longer. I am not going to live on this crazy merry-go-round with no way off of it. I know what I am supposed to do, and I am going to do it. If you don't like it, talk to God. He is the One Who put this vision in me, and I am not going to frustrate myself all my life just to please you.”

“Spread your courtesy across the door posts of everyone you know, but reserve your intimacy with the little trustworthy friends who are going where you are going. Get it simply: wide courtesy, narrow intimacy!”

Do not wait for leaders; do it alone, person to person.”

“Experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind; for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”

“things in this life can be separated into two categories: Things that are valuable and things that matter.”

“I do not take a single newspaper, nor read one a month, and I feel myself infinitely the happier for it.” 

“This is the fourth?