We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.
Have fun, even if it’s not the same kind of fun everyone else is having.
True friends don’t spend time gazing into each other’s eyes. They may show great tenderness towards each other but they face in the same direction – toward common projects, goals – above all, towards a common Lord.
If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
God gives His gifts where He finds the vessel empty enough to receive them.
I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don’t.
If nothing is self-evident, nothing can be proved. Similarly if nothing is obligatory for its own sake, nothing is obligatory at all.
Think of me as a fellow patient in the same hospital who, having been admitted a little earlier could give some advice.
If we only have the will to walk, then God is pleased with our stumbles.
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, ‘All right, then, have it your way.’
How could an idiotic universe have produced creatures whose mere dreams are so much stronger, better, subtler than itself?
It is not enough to want to get rid of one’s sins, we also need to believe in the One who saves us from our sins.
If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means that you are very conceited indeed.
Prayer does not change God; it changes me.
Forgive us as we forgive- we are offered forgiveness on no other terms. To refuse it is to refuse Gods mercy for ourselves.
God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
Many things, such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.
The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can’t supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.
If our deepest desires cannot be satisfied in this world, then we must have been made for another world.