Goodness is, so to speak, itself; badness is only spoiled goodness.
Enemy-occupied territory- that is what the world is.
God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
To what will you look for help if you do not look to that which is stronger than yourself.
The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.
Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.
Pride is essentially competitive....Once the element of competition is gone, pride has gone.
As long as you are proud you cannot know God.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
Feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth 'thrown in': aim at the earth and you will you will get neither.
We never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it.
The road back to God is a road of moral effort of trying harder and harder.
Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
When it comes to knowing God, the initiative is on His side.
God is easy to please but hard to satisfy.
Very often, the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you already had it.
What we are matters more than what we do.
Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in 'religion' mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better.
The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
God is not hurried along in the Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his novel.
If everything seems to come simply by signing cheques, you may forget that you are at every moment totally dependent on God.
God came to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.
The author's comments about pride and competition struck very close to home and remind me of a quote from Brother Jerome Kelly of the Presentation Brothers who once said, "Take down your trophies. Compassion and competition cannot co-exist."
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