“We can never know what might have been but what is to come is another matter entirely”

“The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.”

“Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life from top to bottom, Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”

“In great literature, I become a thousand different men but still remain myself.”

“When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”

“You have not chosen one another, but I have chosen you for one another.”

“Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will 'turn the necessity to glorious gain.”

“At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in.”

“[The decay of Logic results from an] untroubled assumption that the particular is real and the universal is not.” 

“It may well be that by trickery of priests men have sometimes taken a mortal's voice for a god's. But it will not work the other way. No one who hears a god's voice takes it for a man's.”

“Be thou glad sleeper and thy sorrow offcast. I am the gate to all good adventure.”

“Welcome, Prince,' said Aslan. 'Do you feel yourself sufficient to take up the Kingship of Narnia?' I - I don't think I do, Sir,' said Caspian. 'I am only a kid.' Good,' said Aslan. 'If you had felt yourself sufficient, it would have been proof that you were not.”

“Everyone thinks forgiveness is a lovely idea until he has something to forgive.”

“[S]omething inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible.”

“But one of the worst results of being a slave and being forced to do things is that when there is no one to force you any more you find you have almost lost the power of forcing yourself.”