A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading.

I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure that God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do enter your room, you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling.

The claim to equality, outside of the strictly political field, is made only by those who feel themselves to be in some way inferior.

Safety and happiness can only come from individuals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.

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

The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.

Most of us know what we should expect to find in a dragon's lair, but, as I said before, Eustace had read only the wrong books. They had a lot to say about exports and imports and governments and drains, but they were weak on dragons.