"Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou liv'st/Live well, how long or short permit to heaven."
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"’You do not yet look as happy as I mean you to be.’
Lucy said, ‘We’re so afraid of being sent away, Aslan. And you have sent us back into our own world so often.’
‘No fear of that,’ said Aslan. ‘Have you not guessed?’
Their hearts leaped and a wild hope rose within them.
‘There was a real railway accident,’ said Aslan softly. ‘Your father and mother and all of you are – as you used to call it in the Shadowlands – dead. The term is over: the holidays have begun. The dream is over: 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 ever read: which goes on for ever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."
— C.S. Lewis (The Last Battle)

"That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Be strong. Live honorably and with dignity. When you don't think you can, hold on."
— James Frey (A Million Little Pieces)

"It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"It is no disparagement to the garden to say it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit trees, nor roll and cut its own lawns...It will remain a garden only if someone does all these things to it...If you want to see the difference between [the garden's] contribution and the gardener's, put the commonest weed it grows side by side with his hoes rakes, shears, and a packet of weed killer; you have put beauty, energy, and fecundity beside dead, steril things. Just so, our 'decency and common sense' show grey and deathlike beside the geniality of love."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realize how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."
— Bill Watterson (The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book)

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."
— C.S. Lewis

"Gone! ...And you and I quite crestfallen."
— C.S. Lewis (The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader")

"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind."
— Dr. Seuss

"Once a King in Narnia, always a King in Narnia. But don't go trying to use the same route twice. Indeed, don't try to get there at all. It'll happen when you're not looking for it. And don't talk too much about it even among yourselves. And don't mention it to anyone else unless you find that they've had adventures of the same sort themselves. What's that? How will you know? Oh, you'll know all right. Odd things, they say-even their looks-will let the secret out. Keep your eyes open. Bless me, what do they teach them at these schools."
-The Profesor"
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swaps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. it's yours."
— Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)

"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...Come further up, come further in!"
— C.S. Lewis (The Last Battle)

"This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there’s a rumor going around the shop that some of us are someday going to come to life."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Dance like no one is watching. Sing like no one is listening. Love like you've never been hurt and live like it's heaven on Earth."
— Mark Twain

"To the glistening eastern sea, I give you Queen Lucy the Valiant. To the great western woods, King Edmund the Just. To the radiant southern sun, Queen Susan the Gentle. And to the clear northern skies, I give you King Peter the Magnificent. Once a king or queen of Narnia, always a king or queen of Narnia. May your wisdom grace us until the stars rain down from the heavens."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience."
— C.S. Lewis

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
— Edgar Allan Poe

"[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"’Oh, Aslan,’ said Lucy. ‘Will you tell us how to get into your country from our world?’
‘I shall be telling you all the time,’ said Aslan. ‘But I will not tell you how long or short the way will be; only that it lies across a river. But do not fear that, for I am the great Bridge Builder.’"
— C.S. Lewis (The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader")

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."
— Albert Einstein

"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear."
— C.S. Lewis

"What seem our worst prayers may really be, in God's eyes, our best. Those, I mean, which are least supported by devotional feeling. For these may come from a deeper level than feeling. God sometimes seems to speak to us most intimately when he catches us, as it were, off our guard."
— C.S. Lewis

"Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers."
— Charles W. Eliot

"I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious."
— Albert Einstein

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

"You can't know, you can only believe - or not."
— C.S. Lewis

"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. "
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means they are worshiping an imaginary God."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Being a writer means crying over the sad parts, even though you already know it’s going to be okay."
— Clare B. Dunkle

"Nothing you have not given away will ever really be yours."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"Write about what really interests you, whether it is real things or imaginary things, and nothing else."
— C.S. Lewis

"Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away."
— Maya Angelou

"Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit."
— Oscar Wilde

"That's the worst of girls," said Edmund to Peter and the Dwarf. "They never can carry a map in their heads."
"That's because our heads have something inside them," said Lucy."
— C.S. Lewis (Prince Caspian)

"You have a traitor there, Aslan," said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking about himself after all he'd been through and after the talk he'd had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn't seem to matter what the Witch said."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"Don't think or judge, just listen."
— Sarah Dessen (Just Listen)

"I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand a word you say, but I shall still be your affectionate Godfather, C. S. Lewis."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

"Pooh! Grown-ups are always thinking of uninteresting explanations."
— C.S. Lewis (The Magician's Nephew)

"He'll be coming and going" he had said. "One day you'll see him and another you won't. He doesn't like being tied down--and of course he has other countries to attend to. It's quite all right. He'll often drop in. Only you mustn't press him. He's wild, you know. Not like a tame lion."
— C.S. Lewis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

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

"Be the change that you wish to see in the world."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"If ever there is tomorrow when we're not together.. there is something you must always remember. you are braver than you believe, stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think. but the most important thing is, even if we're apart.. I'll always be with you."
— A.A. Milne

"But courage, child: we are all between the paws of the true Aslan."
— C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia)

"Further up and further in!"
— C.S. Lewis

"Things never happen the same way twice.
--Aslan"
— C.S. Lewis (Prince Caspian)

""No thanks," said Digory, "I don't know that I care much about living on and on after everyone I know is dead. I'd rather live an ordinary time and die and go to Heaven.""
— C.S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia)

"A room without books is like a body without a soul."
— Marcus Tullius Cicero

"And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom."
— Anaïs Nin