How many people would like to be good, if only they might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it.

...though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow.

Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.

Each is but a means to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God — not in the laws themselves, except as his means of revealing himself. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God. For human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science, it works with its back to him, and is always leaving him — his intent.

It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.

Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.