“No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.”

“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.”

“If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.”

“It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence.”

“My own plans are made. While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle. When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws. And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world into some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise.”

“When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”

“But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.”

“Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and the in the end, despair.”

“When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over”

“This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.”

“Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”

“I gave in, and admitted that God was God.”

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

“I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”

“Here at last is the thing I was made for.”