"God has an inextinguishable habit of asking people to do things that are scary to them."
--John Ortberg, If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat
"They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in theseves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, 'If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?' When you have found the answer, go and do it."
--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
"But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not."
--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
"This [is] the place where you will have to arm yourself with fortitude."
--Dante, Inferno 34.20-21
"Remember--today will never know another dawn."
--Dante, Purgatorio 12.83-83
"The life of a disciple of Jesus is no spring picnic."
--Paul Tokunaga, Faith on the Edge
"I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness I can show to any creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer it, for I shall not pass this way again."
--Stephen Grellet
"Many things I have tried to grasp, and have lost. That which I have placed in God's hands, I still have."
--Martin Luther
"JUST BECAUSE A BUNCH OF ATHEISTS ARE BETTER WRITERS THAN THE GUYS WHO WROTE THE BIBLE DOESN'T NECESSARILY MAKE THEM RIGHT!"
--John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
"When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy."
--C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to 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. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation...We shall draw nearer to God not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them, and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."
--C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves
"God knows our situation; he will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and perseverance of our will to overcome them."
--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
"Indeed, if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised in the Gospels, 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."
--C. S. Lewis
"...it is the very ordinariness of the disciples that gives me hope. Jesus does not seem to choose his followers on the basis of native talent or perfectibility or potential for greatness. When he lived on earth he surrounded himself with ordinary people who misunderstood him, failed to exercise much spiritual power, and sometimes behaved like churlish schoolchildren."
--Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew
"Don't judge God's holy ideals by my inability to meet them. Don't judge Christ by those of us that imperfectly bear his name."
--Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew
"All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be."
--C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
"...God will forgive all. There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! Man cannot commit a sin so great as to exhaust the infinite love of God. Can there be a sin which could exceed the love of God? Think only of repentance, continual repentance, but dismiss fear all together. Believe that God loves you as you cannot conceive; that He loves you with your sin, in your sin."
--Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov