“Existence is not itself a good thing, that we should spend a lifetime securing its necessaries: a life spent, however victoriously, in securing the necessaries of life is no more than an elaborate furnishing and decoration of apartments for the reception of a guest who is never to come. Our business here is not to live, but to live happily.”

“Do you think I could bear to live on after you died? Oh, Lyra, I'd follow you down to the world of the dead without thinking twice about it, just like you followed Roger; and that would be two lives gone for nothing, my life wasted like yours. No, we should spend our whole lifetimes together, good long busy lives, and if we can't spend them together, we... we'll have to spend them apart.”

“There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading -- that is a good life.”

“Prayer is the center of the Christian life. It is the only necessary thing. It is living with God in the here and now.”

“It must not be forgotten that it is especially dangerous to enslave men in the minor details of life. For my part, I should be inclined to think freedomless necessary in the great things than in the little ones, if it were possible to be secure of the one without the other.”

“The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”