Now is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It won’t last forever. We must take it or leave it.
We make men without chests and expect from them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
If tribulation is a necessary element in redemption, we must anticipate that it will never cease till God sees the world to be either redeemed or no further redeemable.
If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be; if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.
What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects – with their Christianity latent.
Like a good chess player, Satan is always trying to maneuver you into a position where you can save your castle only by losing your bishop.
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds him liking more and more people as he goes on – including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.
And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes.
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
The cross comes before the crown and tomorrow is a Monday morning!
Satan always sends error into the world in pairs that are opposites. His great hope is that you will get so upset about one of his errors, that you’ll react into the opposite one, and he’s got you.
A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.
Every disability conceals a vocation, if only we can find it, which will ’turn the necessity to glorious gain.
Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.
For most of us the prayer in Gethsemane is the only model. Removing mountains can wait.
Adventures are never fun while you’re having them.