"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
— C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

"I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
— C.S. Lewis

"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."
— C.S. Lewis

"We read to know that we are not alone."
— C.S. Lewis

"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing."
— C.S. Lewis

"Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"I wish the ring had never come to me.I wish none of this had happened."-Frodo
Gandalf-"So do all who see such times,but it's not for them to decide.All we have to decide is what to do with the time that's given to us. "
— J.R.R. Tolkien

""'I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it's very difficult to find anyone.' 'I should think so — in these parts! We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!'" — Gandalf and Bilbo, "
— jrr tolkein

"Maturity starts with the willingness to give oneself."
— Elisabeth Elliot (Let Me Be a Woman)

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."
— Jim Elliot

"Wherever you are, be all there! Live to the hilt every situation you believe to be the will of God."
— Jim Elliot

"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
— C.S. Lewis

"Because God has made us for Himself, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him."
— Augustine of Hippo

"God has spoken, and everything else is commentary."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"Salvation is the entire universe being brought back into harmony with its maker."
— Rob Bell (Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith)

"Courage is fear that has said its prayers and decided to go forward anyway."
— Joyce Meyer (I Dare You: Embrace Life with Passion)

"Don't let your feelings be a God to you."
— Joyce Meyer

"Try a thing you haven't done three times. Once to get over the fear of doing it. Twice to learn how to do it. And a third time to figure out whether you like it or not."
— Joyce Meyer

"Love the Lord your God, and love one another. Love one another as He loves. Love with strength and purpose and passion and no matter what comes against you. Don't weaken. Stand against the darkness, and love. That's the way back into Eden. That's the way back to life." "
— Francine Rivers

""The more isolated and disconnected we are, the more shattered and distorted our self-identity. We are not healthy when we are alone. We find ourselves when we connect to others. Without community we don't know who we are...
When we live outside of healthy community, we not only lose others. We lose ourselves...Who we understand ourselves to be is dramatically affected for better or worse by those we hold closest to us.""
— Erwin McManus

""Love, no matter how you come at it, is a huge risk. It makes it easier for me to remember that God will never reject me because I am not good enough and that any community that has His heart will embrace me as I am. Jesus invites us into a community where imperfect people can find acceptance, love, forgiveness, and a new beginning.""
— Erwin McManus

""How is it, that for many of us, being a good Christian is nothing more than being a good person? The entire focus of our faith has been the elimination of sin, which is important but inadequate; rather than the unleashing of a unique, original, extraordinary, wonderfully untamed, faith." "
— Erwin McManus

"Humor is the spiciest condiment in the feast of existence. Laugh at your mistakes but learn from them, joke over your troubles but gather strength from them, make a jest of your difficulties but overcome them."
— L.M. Montgomery

"It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."
— C.S. Lewis (Weight of Glory and Other Addresses)

"Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with."
— Mark Twain

"Many people lose the small joys in the hope for the big happiness."
— Pearl S. Buck

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."
— Martin Luther King Jr.

"You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"Our truest response to the irrationality of the world is to paint or sing or write, for only in such response do we find truth."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"The great thing about getting older is that you don't lose all the other ages you've been."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"No long-term marriage is made easily, and there have been times when I've been so angry or so hurt that I thought my love would never recover. And then, in the midst of near despair, something has happened beneath the surface. A bright little flashing fish of hope has flicked silver fins and the water is bright and suddenly I am returned to a state of love again — till next time. I've learned that there will always be a next time, and that I will submerge in darkness and misery, but that I won't stay submerged. And each time something has been learned under the waters; something has been gained; and a new kind of love has grown. The best I can ask for is that this love, which has been built on countless failures, will continue to grow. I can say no more than that this is mystery, and gift, and that somehow or other, through grace, our failures can be redeemed and blessed."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"In my dreams, I never have an age."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"At Tara in this fateful hour,
I place all Heaven with its power,
And the sun with its brightness,
And the snow with its whiteness,
And the fire with all the strength it hath,
And the lightning with its rapid wrath,
And the winds with their swiftness along their path,
And the sea with its deepness,
And the rocks with their steepness,
And the earth with its starkness:
All these I place,
By God's almighty help and grace
Between myself and the powers of darkness!"
— Madeleine L'Engle (A Swiftly Tilting Planet)

"When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown-up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability... To be alive is to be vulnerable."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"It's a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"A book, too, can be a star, a living fire to lighten the darkness, leading out into the expanding universe."
— Madeleine L'Engle

"God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him"
— John Piper

"Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn't."
— John Piper

"Do you feel loved by God because you believe he makes much of you, or because you believe he frees you and empowers you to enjoy making much of him?"
— John Piper

"If you live gladly to make others glad in God, your life will be hard, your risks will be high, and your joy will be full."
— John Piper (Don't Waste Your Life Study Guide)

""The strength of patience hangs on our capacity to believe that God is up to something good for us in all our delays and detours.""
— John Piper (Battling Unbelief: Defeating Sin with Superior Pleasure)

"The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie.
It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for
heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not
the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we
drink in every night."
— John Piper (A Hunger for God: Desiring God through Fasting and Prayer)

"...sometimes you have to watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself..."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"Imagine, a Being with a mind as great as God's, with feet like trees and a voice like rushing wind, telling you that you are His cherished creation."
— Donald Miller

"I always thought the Bible was more of a salad thing, you know, but it isn't. It's a chocolate thing."
— Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality)

"There is something beautiful about a billion stars held steady by a God who knows what He is doing. (They hang there, the stars, like notes on a page of music, free-form verse, silent mysteries swirling in the blue like jazz.) And as I lay there, it occurred to me that God is up there somewhere. Of course, I had always known He was, but this time I felt it, I realized it, the way a person realizes they are hungry or thirsty. The knowledge of God seeped out of my brain and into my heart. I imagined Him looking down on this earth, half angry because His beloved mankind had cheated on Him, had committed adultery, and yet hopelessly in love with her, drunk with love for her."
— Donald Miller

"Somewhere we know that without silence words lose their meaning, that without listening speaking no longer heals, that without distance closeness cannot cure."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen

"A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us."
— Henri J.M. Nouwen