“Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”

“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”

“Isn't it absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That's how we get things done.”

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

“Whenever all men are...hastening to be slaves or tyrants we make Liberalism the prime bogey.”

“One always feel better when one has made up one's mind.”

“He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)”

“Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.”

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

“Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?”

“Girls aren't very good at keeping maps in their brains", said Edmund, "That's because we've got something in them", replied Lucy.”

“It's so large" "It's the world dear, did you think it'd be small?" "smaller”

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”

“Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.” 

“Digory never spoke on the way back, and the others were shy of speaking to him. He was very sad and he wasn't even sure all the time that he had done the right thing; but whenever he remembered the shining tears in Aslan's eyes he became sure.”