If a tornado twists at 175 miles an hour and stays on the ground like a massive lawnmower for 50 miles, God gave the command.

The really wonderful moments of joy in this world are not the moments of self-satisfaction, but self-forgetfulness. Standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplating your own greatness is pathological. At such moments we are made for a magnificent joy that comes from outside ourselves.

We ought to celebrate the positive glorious gifts of God, but the worth of God shines in a powerful way to the world when in the midst of suffering we still don't curse God but say "The Lord gave and the Lord takes away, blessed be the name of the Lord."

God created us with sexual passion so that there would be language to describe what it means to cleave to him in love and what it means to turn away from him to others.

Paradise will not be a hall of mirrors, it will be a display of majesty, and it won't be ours

Avalanches of evil begin with a single pebble of sin.

Love is the overflow of joy in God! It is not duty for duty's sake, or right for right's sake. It is not a resolute abandoning of one's own good with a view solely to the good of the other person. It is first a deeply satisfying experience of the fullness of God's grace, and then a doubly satisfying experience of sharing that grace with another person.