Tribulations cannot cease until God either sees us remade or sees that our remaking is now hopeless.

The lost enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded.

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

We can conceive of a world in which God corrected the results of abuse of free will by His creatures: so that a wooden beam became soft as grass when used as a weapon... But such a world would be one in which wrong actions were impossible, and therefore, freedom of the will would be void.

Unless thought is valid we have no reason to believe in the real universe.

The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think.

Whatever he says, let his inner resolution be not to bear whatever comes to him, but to bear it 'for a reasonable period'--and let the reasonable period be shorter than the trial is likely to last. It need not be much shorter; in attacks on patience, chastity, and fortitude, the fun is to make the man yield just when (had he but known it) relief was almost in sight.