I will not look at another’s bowl intent on finding fault: a training to be observed.

A mind unruffled by the vagaries of fortune, from sorrow freed, from defilements cleansed, from fear liberated — this is the greatest blessing.

Everything is based on mind, is led by mind, is fashioned by mind. If you speak and act with a polluted mind, suffering will follow you, as the wheels of the oxcart follow the footsteps of the ox.

Delight in heedfulness! Guard well your thoughts!

It is a man’s own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.

He is able who thinks he is able.

Let us rise up and be thankful, for if we didn’t learn a lot today, at least we learned a little, and if we didn’t learn a little, at least we didn’t get sick, and if we got sick, at least we didn’t die; so, let us all be thankful.

In whom there is no sympathy for living beings: know him as an outcast.

Just as a mother would protect her only child with her life, even so let one cultivate a boundless love towards all beings.

Being deeply learned and skilled, being well trained and using well spoken words: this is good luck.

One is not called noble who harms living beings. By not harming living beings one is called noble.

Radiate boundless love towards the entire world.

To love at all is to be vulnerable.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art…. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision – it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude

People who bore one another should meet seldom; people who interest one another, often

Eros will have naked bodies; Friendship naked personalities

Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our natural lives

In a perfect Friendship this Appreciative love is, I think, often so great and so firmly based that each member of the circle feels, in his secret heart, humbled before the rest. Sometimes he wonders what he is doing there among his betters. He is lucky beyond desert to be in such company. Especially when the whole group is together; each bringing out all that is best, wisest, or funniest in all the others

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

We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and private: and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship

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?

There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.

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

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for a bird to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad

Child,’ said the Lion, ‘I am telling you your story, not hers. No one is told any story but their own

Peter did not feel very brave; indeed, he felt he was going to be sick. But that made no difference to what he had to do

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods

Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.

Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again.

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

And as He spoke, He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them. And for us this the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: 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.

God will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop

I never exactly made a book. It’s rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn

It was when I was happiest that I longed most. The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from

The death of a beloved is an amputation

Gratitude looks to the Past and love to the Present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.

The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions. Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand

A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man… It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.

Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed. If it offered us just the kind of universe we had always expected, I should feel we were making it up. But, in fact, it is not the sort of thing anyone would have made up. It has just that queer twist about it that real things have. So let us leave behind all these boys’ philosophies–these over simple answers. The problem is not simple and the answer is not going to be simple either.

Spiteful words can hurt your feelings but silence breaks your heart

I was with book, as a woman is with child.

When you argue against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on

Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turn, then to go forward does not get you any nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive man

Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become

You can’t know, you can only believe – or not.

If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.

Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good

But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words

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

We were promised sufferings. They were part of the program. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accept it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not imagination

Do not dare not to dare.

You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,’ said Aslan. ‘And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor on earth. Be content

The more we let God take us over, the more truly ourselves we become – because He made us. He invented us. He invented all the different people that you and I were intended to be…It is when I turn to Christ, when I give up myself to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own.

Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality

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.

Since it is so likely that [children] will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker

There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him

Adventures are never fun while you’re having them

Relying on God has to begin all over again every day as if nothing had yet been done

It is a very funny thing that the sleepier you are, the longer you take about getting to bed.

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance, the only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours

If you love deeply, you’re going to get hurt badly. But it’s still worth it.

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

Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is… A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in

When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place.

God allows us to experience the low points of life in order to teach us lessons that we could learn in no other way

There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.

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?

Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear

The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts

He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.

A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.

The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see

Don’t use words too big for the subject. Don’t say infinitely when you mean very; otherwise you’ll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

Courage, dear heart.

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

Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise, it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him

The great thing to remember is that though our feelings come and go God’s love for us does not

Things never happen the same way twice

Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

We meet no ordinary people in our lives.

Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.

If you look for 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, and in the end, despair

What you see and what you hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are

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

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.

I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once

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

God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing

Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say ‘My tooth is aching’ than to say ‘My heart is broken.

I have learned now that while those who speak about one’s miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more

We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be

A children’s story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children’s story in the slightest.

It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased

You can make anything by writing.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again

It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between

Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else

You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me