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 most dangerous ideas in a society are not the ones being argued, but the ones that are assumed.

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents.

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.

A voice had begun to sing. It was very far away and Digory found it hard to decide from what direction it was coming. Sometimes it seemed to come from all directions at once. Sometimes he almost thought it was coming out of the earth beneath them. Its lower notes were deep enough to be the voice of the earth herself. There were no words. It was hardly a tune. But it was beyond comparison, the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.

It is in their 'good' characters that novelists make, unawares, the most shocking self- revelations.

The hills and valleys of Heaven will be to those you now experience not as a copy is to an original, nor as the substitute is to the genuine article, but as the flower to the root, or the diamond to the coal.