“Yes,” said Queen Lucy. “In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”

“I can see only three planets in the entire universe, namely Heaven, Earth and Me! Heaven shines its glory on Earth and the rays keep falling on Me! I have a call!”

“Wherever your treasure is, your heart will be also.”

“Be polite in your speeches. Good information rudely communicated will make no positive difference.”

“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.”

“Here's my strategy on the Cold War: we win, they lose.”

“Now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

“All mankind is sitting on Death Row. How we die or when is not the main issue, but where [we] go after death.”

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.”

“The Law of Forced Efficiency says, “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important things.”

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

“When you look at yourself from a universal standpoint, something inside always reminds or informs you that there are bigger and better things to worry about.”

“Everyone wants to change humanity, but no one is willing to change themselves.”

“Does it ever happen to you," Natasha said to her brother, when they had settled in the sitting room, "does it ever happen to you that you feel there's nothing more - nothing; that everything good has already happened? And it's not really boring, but sad?" "As if it doesn't!" he said. "It's happened to me that everything's fine, everybody's merry, and it suddenly comes into my head that it's all tiresome and we all ought to die....”

“In a gentle way you can shake the world.”