Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it.
The good man’s past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven.
Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing.
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
There seems to be hardly any one among my acquaintance from whom I have not learned.
Something deep in the human heart breaks at the thought of a life of mediocrity.
Before we can be cured, we must want to be cured.
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.
The devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one.
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.
When we are wholly His we will be more ourselves than ever.
We shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
The full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination.
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
In commanding us to glorify Him, God is inviting us to enjoy Him.
Spying on people by magic is the same as spying on them in any other way.
The first demand any work of art makes upon us is to surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.
Your place in Heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it.
You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness.