“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 they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.”

“They have chosen cunning instead of belief. Their prison is only in their minds, yet they are in that prison; and so afraid of being taken in that they cannot be taken out.”

“I seemed to hear God saying, "Put down your gun and we'll talk.”

“A powerful dragon crying its eyes out under the moon in a deserted valley is a sight and a sound hardly to be imagined.”

“You do not see as quite as well as you think.”

“Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean “More people died” don’t say “Mortality rose.”

“When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”

“Are the gods not just?" "Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”

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

“Every joy is beyond all others.”

“You can do more with a castle in a story than with the best cardboard castle that ever stood on a nursery table.”

“We are what we believe we are!”

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

“But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.”