Love never asks what benefit it will derive from love. Love from its very nature is a disinterested thing. It loves for the creature's sake it loves, and for nothing else.

When joy and prayer are married, their first born child is gratitude.

We are all damaged goods in recovery.

Stars may be seen from the bottom of a deep well, when they cannot be discerned from the top of a mountain. So are many things learned in adversity which the prosperous man [the man at ease] dreams not of.

Not for yourself, O church, do you exist, any more than Christ existed for himself.

Free will I have often heard of, but I have never seen it. I have always met with will, and plenty of it, but it has either been led captive by sin or held in the blessed bonds of grace.

Habits, soft and pliant at first, are like some coral stones, which are easily cut when first quarried, but soon become hard as adamant.