No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.

The jealous man is so preoccupied with what he hasn't got that he fails to appreciate the value of what he has got. He loses the ability to feel glad because the sun is shining. He doesn't see the wonder and the newness of the beginning of spring.

Bereavement is the deepest initiation into the mysteries of human life, an initiation more searching and profound than even happy love.

If we feel that any habit or pursuit, harmless in itself, is keeping us from God and sinking us deeper in the things of earth; if we find that things which others can do with impunity are for us the occasion of falling, then abstinence is our only course. Abstinence alone can recover for us the real value of what should have been for our help but which has been an occasion of falling. ... It is necessary that we should steadily resolve to give up anything that comes between ourselves and God.

The command, 'Be fruitful and multiply', was promulgated, according to our authorities, when the population of the world consisted of two persons.

No healthy civilization can ever be reared on a foundation of devitalized work.

Love remembered and consecrated by grief belongs, more clearly than the happy intercourse of friends, to the eternal world; it has proved itself stronger than death.