The value of myth is that it takes all the things you know and restores to them the rich significance which has been hidden by the veil of familiarity.

That part of Rostrevor which overlooks Carlingford Lough is my idea of Narnia.

If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it's not so bad.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.

No good poem, however confessional it may be, is just a self-expression. Who on earth would claim that the pearl expresses the oyster?

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.