"People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives. Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat you. Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough. Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God. It was never between you and them anyway."
— Mother Teresa

"I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish he didn't trust me so much."
— Mother Teresa

"(The Christian) does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."
— C.S. Lewis

"I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ."
— Mahatma Gandhi

"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)

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

"What year did Jesus think it was?"
— George Carlin

"A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is... A man who gives in to temptation after five minutes simply does not know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in."
— C.S. Lewis (Mere Christianity)

"We are saved by faith alone, but the faith that saves is never alone."
— Martin Luther

"It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is He who provoked you with that thirst for fullness that will not let you settle for compromise; it is He who urges you to shed the masks of a false life; it is He who reads in your heart your most genuine choices, the choices that others try to stifle.

It is Jesus who stirs in you the desire to do something great with your lives, the will to follow an ideal, the refusal to allow yourselves to be ground down by mediocrity, the courage to commit yourselves humbly and patiently to improving yourselves and society, makng the world more human and more fraternal."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

"Give me a break." (Lennon's comment to fundamentalist Christian outrage at his comment that the Beatles were now more popular than Jesus)"
— John Lennon

"Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The glory of Christianity is to conquer by forgiveness."
— William Blake

"..For GOD is greater than our hearts, and He knows everything."
— Holy Bible - John 3 : 20

"In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that-and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison-you do not know God at all. "
— C.S. Lewis

"The wisdom of God devised a way for the love of God to deliver sinners from the wrath of God while not compromising the righteousness of God."
— John Piper (Desiring God: Meditations of a Christian Hedonist)

"If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same."
— C.S. Lewis (The Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis: The Pilgrim's Regress, Christian Reflections, & God in the Dock (Inspirational Christian Library) Hardcover Book)

" If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.
"
— Lenny Bruce

"The spiritualization of sensuality is called love: it is a great triumph over Christianity."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"In Christianity neither morality nor religion come into contact with reality at any point."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"When you have reached the point where you no longer expect a response, you will at last be able to give in such a way that the other is ale to receive, and be grateful. When Love has matured and, through a dissolution of the self into light, become a radiance, then shall the Lover be liberated from dependence upon the Beloved, and the Beloved also be made perfect by being liberated from the Lover."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer."
— Holy Bible - Matthew 21 : 22

"Let my heart be broken by the things that break the heart of God."
— Bob Pierce

"We profess to be strangers and pilgrims, seeking after a country of our own, yet we settle down in the most un-stranger-like fashion, exactly as if we were quite at home and meant to stay as long as we could. I don't wonder apostolic miracles have died. Apostolic living certainly has."
— Amy Carmichael

"Jesus was not revolutionary because he said we should love God and each other. Moses said that first. So did Buddha, Confucius, and countless other religious leaders we've never heard of. Madonna, Oprah, Dr. Phil, the Dali Lama, and probably a lot of Christian leaders will tell us that the point of religion is to get us to love each other. "God loves you" doesn't stir the world's opposition. However, start talking about God's absolute authority, holiness, ... Christ's substitutionary atonement, justification apart from works, the necessity of new birth, repentance, baptism, Communion, and the future judgment, and the mood in the room changes considerably."
— Michael S. Horton

"In the midst of the affliction He counsels, strengthens confirms, nourishes, and favors us.... More over, when we have repented, He instantly remits the sins as well as the punishments. In the same manner parents ought to handle their children."
— Martin Luther

"And then I stand in front of God's Throne squinting up at His blazing glory and He says, 'You had your opportunities, boy. But did you listen? No. You went on heedlesly reading that garbagey magazine with pictures of naked girls in it. How juvenile! I gave geese more sense than that.'

Please, God. I'm only fourteen years old. A teenager. Have mercy. Be loving.

'I was,' says God. 'For eons. And look at what it got me. You.'

God turns in disgust, just the way Daddy does. 'Sorry, but I'm the Creator. I take it personally. There are slugs and bugs and night-crawlers I feel better about having created - I mean, there are sparrows - I've got my eye on one right now. Is that sparrow consumed with lust? No. He mates in the spring and that's the end of it. Consider the lilies. Do they think about lily tits all the time? No. They look not and they lust not, and yet I say unto you that you will never be half as attractive as they. Therefore, I say unto you, think not about peckers and boobs and all that nonsense and your Heavenly Father will see that you meet a good woman and marry her, just as I do for the sparrow and walleye - yea verily, even the night-crawler and the eelpout. But I've told you this over and over for nineteen centuries. And now, verily, it's too late. Time's up, buster. Lights out! Game's over!'"
— Garrison Keillor

"Let mental culture go on advancing, let the natural sciences progress in even greater extent and depth, and the human mind widen itself as much as it desires: beyond the elevation and moral culture of Christianity, as it shines forth in the Gospels, it will not go."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness"
— Norman Cousins

"Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly."
— Martin Luther

"If you live today, you breath in nihilism ... it's the gas you breathe. If I hadn't had the Church to fight it with or to tell me the necessity of fighting it, I would be the stinkingest logical positivist you ever saw right now."
— Flannery O'Connor

"The peace of God is that eternal calm which, like the cushion of the sea, lies far too deep down to be reached by any external trouble or disturbance; and he who enters into the presence of God becomes a partaker of that undisturbed and undisturbable calm."
— A.J. Pierson

"The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn."
— Martin Luther

"The measure of a Christian is not in the height of his grasp but in the depth of his love"
— Clarence Jordan

"He was alone in his wonderment,
amoung creatures incapable of wonder
--for them it was enough to exist and go their way."
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

"...all that is carried along
by the stream's silvery cascade,
rhythmically falling from the mountain,
carried by its own current--
carried where?"
— Pope John Paul II (Karol Wojtyła)

""The faith is not the problem, Bernadette. The problem is the faithful.""
— Robert Ferrigno (Prayers for the Assassin: A Novel)

"For all works and things, which are either commanded or forbidden by God and thus have been instituted by the
supreme Majesty, are 'musts.' Nevertheless, no one should be dragged to them or away from them by the hair, for I can drive no man to heaven or beat him into it with a club."
— Martin Luther

"Lovers must not, like usurers, live for themselves alone. They must finally turn from their gaze at one another back toward the community. If they had only themselves to consider, lovers would not need to marry, but they must think of others and of other things. They say their vows to the community as much as to one another, and the community gathers around them to hear and to wish them well, on their behalf and its own. It gathers around them because it understands how necessary, how joyful, and how fearful this joining is. These lovers, pledging themselves to one another "until death," are giving themselves away, and they are joined by this as no law or contract could join them. Lovers, then, "die" into their union with one another as a soul "dies" into its union with God. And so here, at the very heart of community life, we find not something to sell as in the public market but this momentous giving. If the community cannot protect this giving, it can protect nothing..."
— Wendell Berry (Sex, Economy, Freedom & Community: Eight Essays)

"The peace of the celestial city is the perfectly ordered and harmonious enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. (City of God, Book 19)"
— Augustine of Hippo

"The theological perspective of participation actually saves the appearances by exceeding them. It recognizes that materialism and spiritualism are false alternatives, since if there is only finite matter there is not even that, and that for phenomena really to be there they must be more than there. Hence, by appealing to an eternal source for bodies, their art, language, sexual and political union, one is not ethereally taking leave of their density. On the contrary, one is insisting that behind this density resides an even greater density – beyond all contrasts of density and lightness (as beyond all contrasts of definition and limitlessness). This is to say that all there is only is because it is more than it is. (...)

This perspective should in many ways be seen as undercutting some of the contrasts between theological liberals and conservatives. The former tend to validate what they see as the modern embrace of our finitude – as language, and as erotic and aesthetically delighting bodies, and so forth. Conservatives, however, seem still to embrace a sort of nominal ethereal distancing from these realities and a disdain for them. Radical orthodoxy, by contrast, sees the historic root of the celebration of these things in participatory philosophy and incarnational theology, even if it can acknowledge that premodern tradition never took this celebration far enough. The modern apparent embrace of the finite it regards as, on inspection, illusory, since in order to stop the finite vanishing modernity must construe it as a spatial edifice bound by clear laws, rules and lattices. If, on the other hand, following the postmodern options, it embraces the flux of things, this is an empty flux both concealing and revealing an ultimate void. Hence, modernity has oscillated between puritanism (sexual or otherwise) and an entirely perverse eroticism, which is in love with death and therefore wills the death also of the erotic, and does not preserve the erotic as far as an eternal consummation. In a bizarre way, it seems that modernity does not really want what it thinks it wants; but on the other hand, in order to have what it thinks it wants, it would have to recover the theological. Thereby, of course, it would discover also that that which it desires is quite other than it has supposed"
— John Milbank (Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology)

"We were taught to pray with our eyes shut."
— David Knudsen

"I continue to experience my faith in God as a personal relationship between the two of us. However, having admitted my commonality with the human race, I find that my faith does not flourish in isolation. As much as I hate to admit it, my faith is enhanced and enlarged when in relationship to other less-than-perfect human beings. Even though at times other Christians can be quite annoying, I feel very fortunate to have found my way back to a spiritual community that puts up with me even when I'm a bit annoying myself."
— Carmen Renee Berry (The Unauthorized Guide to Choosing a Church)

"I always tell my Western friends that it is best to keep your own tradition. Changing religion is not easy and sometimes causes confusion. You must value your tradition and honor your own religion."
— Dalai Lama XIV

"A lot of people say I'm a hypocrite. I am not a very good example of Christianity but I am a much improved version of what I once was. "
— Alex Ice Road Truckers.

"Of course, I quiet agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable discomfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through that dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get looking for it. If you look for the truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth-only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and the in the end, despair."
— C.S. Lewis

"Indeed taking all the evidence together, it is not too much to say that there is no single historic incident better or more variously supported than the Resurrection of Christ. Nothing but the antecedent assumption that it must be false could have suggested the idea of deficiency in the proof of it."
— Brooke Foss Westcott

"To regret religion is to regret Western civilization."
— Theodore Dalrymple