Regarding the debate about faith and works: It's like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most important.

You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth of falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?

It is not your business to succeed, but to do right. When you have done so the rest lies with god.

One must never be either content with, or impatient with, oneself.

You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon seen through a dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens.

Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.

God doesn't want something from us. He simply wants us.