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

“Human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to believe in a certain way, and can't really get rid of it.”

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

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

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

“How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints.”

“For all find what they truly seek.”

“The stamp of the Saint is that he can waive his own rights and obey the Lord Jesus.”

“Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ('How time flies! Fancy John being grown-up and married! I can hardly believe it!') In heavens name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal.”

“And so take away his work, which was his life [. . .] and all his glory and his great deeds? Make a child and a dotard of him? Keep him to myself at that cost? Make him so mine that he was no longer his?”

“But Pride always means enmity -- it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.”

“Excess of love, did ye say? There was no excess, there was defect. She loved her son too little, not too much. If she had loved him more there'd be no difficulty.”

“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating. The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and to each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they've got to be free. Of course God knew what would happen if they used their freedom the wrong way: apparently, He thought it worth the risk. (...) If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will -that is, for making a real world in which creatures can do real good or harm and something of real importance can happen, instead of a toy world which only moves when He pulls the strings- then we may take it it is worth paying.”

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.”

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