So long as we imagine that it is we who have to look for God, then we must often lose heart. But it is the other way about: he is looking for us.... He has followed us into our own darkness; there where we thought finally to escape him, we run straight into his arms.

Both the believer and the unbeliever share, each in his own way, doubt and belief. [Doubt] saves both sides from being shut up in their own worlds...it prevents both from enjoying complete self-satisfaction.... It opens up the believer to the doubter and the doubter to the believer; for one it is his share in the fate of the unbeliever, for the other the form in which belief remains nevertheless a challenge to him....

We cannot learn to love God by learning not to love.

I could tell him, too, that to know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.

God is love, and love conquers death.

...what cannot be seen...is not unreal; ...on the contrary, what cannot be seen in fact represents true reality, the element that supports and makes possible all the rest of reality. And ... this element that makes reality as a whole possible is also what grants man a truly human existence.

It is never too late to touch the heart of another, nor is it ever in vain.

God will not conquer evil by crushing it underfoot—any god of man’s idea could do that—but by conquest of heart over heart, of life over life, of life over death, of love over all.

If there’s no heaven, what’s this hunger for?

The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.

And this has been the course of lawless pride ever since: to lead us, first, to exult in our uncontrollable liberty of will and conduct; then, when we have ruined ourselves, to plead that we are the slaves of necessity.

Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong: beauty enchanting but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.

I think we need a God, if only to have someone to thank.

Sir, you observed one day at General Oglethorpe’s, that a man is never happy for the present, but when he is drunk. Will you not add, or when driving rapidly in a post-chaise?