"I am in Love, and out of it I will not go." ~The Great Divorce
"God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing." ~Mere Christianity
[On loving your neighbor] "I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself... Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves." ~Mere Christianity
"God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass. You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created. When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world." ~Mere Christianity
"It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it 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." ~Mere Christianity
"The more we get what we now call "ourselves" out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become... Our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to "be myself" without Him." ~Mere Christianity
"Give up your self, 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 ever 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." ~Mere Christianity
"What may happen when the redeemed soul, beyond all hope and nearly beyond belief, learns at last that she has pleased Him whom she was created to please... To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son—it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is." ~The Weight of Glory
"It may be possible for each to think too much of his own potential glory hereafter; it is hardly possible for him to think too often or too deeply about that of his neighbour... It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses... All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities... that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal... Our charity must be a real and costly love... Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses." ~The Weight of Glory
"The Enemy is really here, really saying and doing things. Where is [God's] representative?... And then - he wondered how it had escaped him till now - he was forced to perceive that his own coming... was at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy's. That miracle on the right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occurred. He himself was the miracle... If the issue lay in [God's] hands, Ransom and the Lady were those hands." ~Perelandra
"Thus, and not otherwise, the world was made. Either something or nothing must depend on individual choices. And if something, who could set the bounds to it? A stone may determine the course of a river." ~Perelandra
"Who is Aslan? Do you know him?"
"Well - he knows me," said Edmund.
~The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
"In our world," said Eustace, "a star is a huge ball of flaming gas."
"Even in your world, my son, that is not what a star is but only what it is made of."
~The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
"In our world too, a stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world." ~The Last Battle
""You see, " said Aslan. "They will not let us help them. They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their own minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out." ~The Last Battle
"Child, all the service thou hast done to Tash, I account as service done to me... Not because he and I are one, but because we are opposites, I take to me the services which thou hast done to him. For I and he are of such different kinds that no service which is vile can be done to me, and none which is not vile can be done to him. Therefore if any man swear by Tash and keep his oath for the oath's sake, it is by me that he has truly sworn, though he know it not, and it is I who reward him. And if any man do a cruelty in my name, then, though he says the name Aslan, it is Tash whom he serves and by Tash his deed is accepted. Dost thou understand, Child? I said, Lord, thou knowest how much I understand. But I said also (for the truth constrained me), Yet I have been seeking Tash all my days. Beloved, said the Glorious One, unless thy desire had been for me thou wouldst not have sought so long and so truly. For all find what they truly seek." ~The Last Battle
"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia is that it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!" ~The Last Battle
""The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is ended: this is the morning." 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 is 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 forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before." ~The Last Battle
"No one ever told me that grief feels so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing." ~A Grief Observed
"Friendship has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival." ~The Four Loves
"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one!" ~The Four Loves
"People are themselves, odder than you could have believed and worth far more than we guessed." ~The Four Loves
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Lock it up safe in the casket of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is hell." ~The Four Loves
"We shall draw nearer to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it." ~The Four Loves
"It is probably impossible to love any human being simply "too much." We may love him too much in proportion to our love for God; but it is the smallness of our love for God, not the greatness of our love for the man, the constitues the inordinacy." ~The Four Loves
