"Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company."
— Mark Twain

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

"The thinking that has gotten us to where we are will be insufficient to solve the problems created in getting us here."
— Albert Einstein

"Jerry Falwell said that the reason that September 11th happened, the reason that God allowed it to happen, was because of certain people in our country. People like, and I'm quoting, 'the pagans,' which is a motorcycle group. Feminists; he brought up feminists. [...] And I couldn't believe it, he said that God had actually talked to him and said, these were the people. That was the reason. It was those people, and that was the reason God allowed this to happen. And I thought, 'That's odd.' Because God had called me twelve hours before, and He said the reason He was upset was because of people like Jerry Falwell."
— Lewis Black

"Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under the cover of fiction without their knowing it."
— C.S. Lewis

"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

"Only a very few can be learned, but all can be Christian, all can be devout, and – I shall boldly add – all can be theologians."
— Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus

"Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. It's a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God. If we don't want God above all things, we have not been converted by the gospel."
— John Piper (God Is the Gospel: Meditations on God's Love as the Gift of Himself)

"It is better to lose your life than to waste it."
— John Piper

"Fight for us, O God, that we not drift numb and blind and foolish into vain and empty excitements. Life is too short, too precious, too painful to waste on worldly bubbles that burst. Heaven is too great, hell is too horrible, eternity is too long that we should putter around on the porch of eternity."
— John Piper

"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

"We fear men so much, because we fear God so little."
— William Gurnall

"Swamp Thing, in Hell: "Demon...How...could God...allow such a place?

Etrigan: Think you God built this place, wishing man ill and not lusts uncontrolled or swords unsheathed?

Not God, my friend. The truth's more hideous still: These halls were carved by men while yet they breathed.

God is no parent or policeman grim dispensing treats or punishments to all.

Each soul climbs or descends by its own whim. He mourns, but He cannot prevent their fall.

We suffer as we choose. Nothing's amiss. All torments are deserved..."
— Alan Moore (Swamp Thing Vol. 2: Love and Death)

"Every formula which expresses a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God."
— Maria Mitchell

"Humour is, in fact, a prelude to faith; and laughter is the beginning of prayer … Laughter is swallowed up in prayer and humour is fulfilled by faith."
— Reinhold Niebuhr (Children of Light and the Children of Darkness)

"I feel compelled to make another 'nonapology.' Many readers are likely to be concerned about my use of masculine pronouns in relation to God. I think I both understand and appreciate this concern. It is a matter to which I have given much thought. I have generally been a strong supporter of the women's movement and action that is reasonable to combat sexist language. But first of all, God is not neuter. He is exploding with life and love and even sexuality of a sort. So 'It' is not appropriate. Certainly I consider God androgynous. He is as gentle and tender and nurturing and maternal as any woman could ever be. Nonetheless, culturally determined though it may be, I subjectively experience His reality as more masculine than feminine. While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us, and while we more often than not flee from His love like a reluctant virgin, He chases after us with a vigor in the hunt that we most typically associate with males. As CS Lewis put it, in relation to God we are all female. Moreover, whatever our gender or conscious theology, it is our duty---our obligation---in response to His love to attempt to give birth, like Mary, to Christ in ourselves and in others.

"I shall, however, break with tradition and use the neuter for Satan. While I know Satan to be lustful to penetrate us, I have not in the least experienced this desire as sexual or creative---only hateful and destructive. It is hard to determine the sex of a snake."
— M. Scott Peck (People of the Lie)

"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)

"What the mind cannot accept, the heart can finally never adore."
— John Shelby Spong

"Woe to us if we get our satisfaction from the food in the kitchen and the TV in the den and the sex in the bedroom with an occasional tribute to the cement blocks in the basement! God wills to be displayed and known and loved and cherished and worshiped."
— John Piper

"Nothing can be rightly known, if God be not known; nor is any study well managed, nor to any great purpose, if God is not studied. We know little of the creature, till we know it as it stands related to the Creator: single letters, and syllables uncomposed, are no better than nonsense. He who overlooketh him who is the 'Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the ending,' and seeth not him in all who is the All of all, doth see nothing at all. All creatures, as such, are broken syllables; they signify nothing as separated from God. Were they separated actually, they would cease to be, and the separation would be annhiliation; and when we separate them in our fancies, we make nothing of them to ourselves. It is one thing to know the creatures as Aristotle, and another thing to know them as a Christian. None but a Christian can read one line of his Physics so as to understand it rightly. It is a high and excellent study, and of greater use than many apprehend; but it is the smallest part of it that Aristotle can teach us."
— Richard Baxter (The Reformed Pastor)

"If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic."
— Ann Druyan

"John 3:16
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.""
— John, a disciple of Jesus

"Matthew 10:34
“Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword."
— Matthew, a disciple of Jesus

"One possibility is: G-d is nothing but the power of the universe to organize itself."
— Lee Smolin

"God's revelation... unmasks our illusions about ourselves. It exposes our pride, our individualism, our self-centeredness - in short, our sin. But worship also offers forgiveness, healing, transformation, motivation, and courage to work in the world for God's justice and peace - in short, salvation in its largest sense."
— Marva J. Dawn (Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture)

"...we are to be lights in the world. It is God's business to light us, to set us on the lampstand, and to bring the people into the house. Our only duty is to shine forth with the gospel."
— Marva J. Dawn (Reaching Out Without Dumbing Down: A Theology of Worship for the Turn-of-the-Century Culture)

"We may not play with the new theology even if we may think we can turn it to our advantage."
— Francis Schaeffer

"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."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object – we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all."
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2010: Odyssey Two)

"If you do not love, you will not be alive; if you love effectively, you will be killed."
— Herbert McCabe (Faith Within Reason)

"Cheap grace is the deadly enemy of our church. We are fighting today for costly grace."
— Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"Theologians and other clerks,
You won't understand this book,
-- However bright your wits --
If you do not meet it humbly,
And in this way, Love and Faith
Make you surmount Reason, for
They are the protectors of Reason's house. "
— Marguerite Porete

"And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?"
— Ann Druyan

"Several expressions Paul uses help to illuminate the wonder of Christ's grace. They suggest, as it might be put, that Jesus is portrayed here as 'Adam in reverse' (cf. Rom. 5:12-21).

(i) His being in the form of God but not counting equality with God a thing to be grasped (v. 6) reminds us of Adams failure. He was created as the image and likeness of God (Gen. 1:26). But he grasped after equality with God ('you will be like God' [Gen. 3:5], the tempter suggested). By contrast, Jesus, whose right equality with God always was, did not refuse to become obedient (v. 8).

(ii) The Son made himself nothing [emptied himself] ... taking the form of a servant (v. 7). Here we may have an echo of the great prophecy in Isaiah 52:13-43:12, where the Sufferer 'poured out his life to death' (Isa. 53:12). He is described by God as 'my servant' (Isa. 52:13). He did what Adam refused to do: serve God.

(iii) The incarnate Son became obedient to the point of death. In Romans 5:12-21 Paul gives us an exposition of these words by means of an extended comparison between Jesus and Adam. Adam's disobedience brought sin and death into the world; by contrast, Jesus' obedience brings righteousness and life into it."
— Sinclair B. Ferguson (Let's Study Philippians)

"God is pursuing with omnipotent passion a worldwide purpose of gathering joyful worshipers for Himself from every tribe and tongue and people and nation. He has an inexhaustible enthusiasm for the supremacy of His name among the nations. Therefore, let us bring our affections into line with His, and, for the sake of His name, let us renounce the quest for worldly comforts and join His global purpose."
— John Piper