Only the believer obeys — obedience follows faith, the way good fruit comes from a good tree. Only the obedient believe.

Loving God means rejoicing in God, being eager to think of and pray to God. It means being glad to be in God's presence and to be with God alone. It means not grieving God, but rejoicing in God simply because it is God who is involved, and because we are permitted to know and have God, and to speak with and live with God.

God wants to see human beings, not ghosts who shun the world. . . . Our marriage must be a 'yes' to God's earth. It must strengthen our resolve to do and accomplish something on earth. I fear that Christians who venture to stand on earth on only one leg will stand in heaven on only one leg too.

The limitation of the ethical phenomenon to its place and time does not imply its rejection but, on the contrary, its validation. One does not use canons to shoot sparrows.

The church ... is not just to bandage the victims under the wheel, but to put a spoke in the wheel itself.

The best-informed man is not necessarily the wisest. Indeed there is a danger that precisely in the multiplicity of his knowledge he will lose sight of what is essential. But on the other hand, knowledge of an apparently trivial detail quite often makes it possible to see into the depth of things. And so the wise man will seek to acquire the best possible knowledge about events, but always without becoming dependent upon this knowledge. To recognize the significant in the factual is wisdom.

The fact that we do not speak it but sing it only expresses the fact that our spoken words are inadequate to express what we want to say, that the burden of our song goes far beyond all human words.