“After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but just this power of always trying again.”

“The universe rings true whenever you fairly test it.”

“The perfect church service would be one we were almost unaware of. Our attention would have been on God.”

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.”

“Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.”

“Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.”

“but who can feel ugly, when their heart feels joy”

“...Aslan didn't tell Pole what would happen. He only told her what to do. That fellow will be the death of us once he's up, I shouldn't wonder. But that doesn't let us off following the signs.”

“Whenever you are fed up with life, start writing: ink is the great cure for all human ills, as I have found out long ago.”

“It now seemed to me that all my other guesses had been only self-pleasing dreams spun out of my wishes, but now I was awake.”

“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

“But length of days with an evil heart is only length of misery and already she begins to know it. All get what they want; they do not always like it.”

“What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.”

“The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object.”

“If ever they remembered their life in this world it was as one remembers a dream.”