How little people know who think that holiness is dull... When one meets the real thing, it's irresistible!

The distinction between pretending you are better than you are and beginning to be better in reality is finer than moral sleuth hounds conceive.

Vanity is really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, admiration too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are in fact still human.

All these toys were never intended to possess my heart. My true good is in another world, and my only real treasure is Christ.

All day I have been tossed and whirled in a preposterous happiness; was it an elf in the blood? Or a bird in the brain? Or even part of the cloudily crested, fifty-league-long, loud, uplifted wave of a journeying angels transit over and through my heart?

It is easy to acknowledge, but almost impossible to realize for long, that we are mirrors whose brightness, if we are bright, is wholly derived from the sun that shines upon us.

The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.