Men are used as they use others.

There is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything... He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.

Courage and grace are a formidable mixture. The only place to see it is in the bullring.

Man wants but little here below, Nor wants that little long.

If .. 'Ifs and buts' were candy and nuts...oh, what a party we would have.

Every good friend once was a stranger.

All the biblical miracles will at last disappear with the progress of science.

Sometimes, it is good to be "alone".... but that doesn't make us lonely. It is not a matter of being present "with" someone, it is a matter of being present " to" someone.

Lasting harmony with a woman an undertaking in which I twice failed rather disgracefully.

Her very frowns are fairer far Than smiles of other maidens are.

Commemoration of Caroline Chisholm, Social Reformer, 1877 You and I drift on through the years dully enough, because we do not believe in God, not really, and so we have no expectation. But Jesus did believe in Him, was sure He is alive and abroad in the world; that, therefore, anything may happen any hour. And thus to Him any smallest incident was a magic casement opening upon who could tell what possibilities. A fisherman offers Him a crude, inchoate half-faith, and with that He is sure that He can found a world-wide Church that will defy the powers of evil, aye, and grind them into nothingness at last: a dying brigand, paying the just penalties of his crimes, gropes towards Him in the darkness with the vague hands of a blind man, and, founding upon that, Christ dies, quite sure that He has won: two or three Gentiles seek an interview with Him, and He sees a whole teeming world of men and women being saved.

Love has reasons that reason knows nothing of.

We [must not] underestimate the enormity of the claim [made by the Jews]. Again and again in the Pentateuch, the psalms, the prophets, and the subsequent writings which derive from them, the claim is made that the creator of the entire universe has chosen to live uniquely on a small ridge called Mount Zion, near the eastern edge of the Judean hill-country. The sheer absurdity of this claim, from the standpoint of any other worldview (not least that of Enlightenment philosophy), is staggering. The fact that Assyria, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt again, Syria and now Rome had made explicit mockery of the idea did not shake this conviction, but only intensified it. This was what Jewish monotheism looked like on the ground.

Feast of Thomas the Apostle Those who make it a reproach to Christianity that it taught no new morality and invented no new kind of Deity could not be more laughably wide of the mark. What it did was to guarantee that the old morality was actually valid, and the old beliefs literally true. "Ye worship ye know not what, but we know what we worship," "that which we have seen with our eyes and our hands have handled" -- "He suffered under Pontius Pilate." God died -- not in a legend, not in a symbol, not in a distant past nor in a realm unknown, but here, [in the crucifiction of Christ]; the whole great cloudy castle of natural religion and poetic prophecy is brought down to earth and firmly cemented upon that angular and solid cornerstone.

Speak clearly, if you speak at all; carve every word before you let it fall.

Roses are red Violets are blue Most poems rhyme This one doesn't.

I was raised to feel that doing nothing was a sin. I had to learn to do nothing.

Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite.

He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.

But we must believe that Judas, who repented even to agony, who repented so that his high-prized life, self, soul, became worthless in his eyes and met with no mercy at his own hand, -- must we believe he could find no mercy in such a God? I think when Judas fled from his hanged and fallen body, he fled to the tender help of Jesus, and found it -- I say not how. He was in a more hopeful condition now than during any moment of his past life, for he had never repented before. But I believe that Jesus loved Judas even when he was kissing Him with traitor's kiss; and I believe that He was his Saviour still.