“We must be ready to learn from one another, not claiming that we alone possess all truth and that somehow we have a corner on God.”

“You are the perfect creation of God. Don’t allow you to be down. God is experiencing through you.”

“I have no duty to be anyone’s Friend and no man in the world has a duty to be mine. No claims, no shadow of necessity. Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.”

“‎”Do you know that nothing you do in this life will ever matter, unless it is about loving God and loving the people he has made?”

“My feeling is, quite simply, that if there is a God, He has done such a bad jobthat he isn’t worth discussing.”

“But for me the sweetest contact with God has no form. I close my eyes, look within, and enter a deep soft silence. The infinity of God’s creation embraces me.”

“The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie.It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite forheaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is notthe X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality wedrink in every night.”

“I have been finding treasures in places I did not want to search. I have been hearing wisdom from tongues I did not want to listen. I have been finding beauty where I did not want to look. And I have learned so much from journeys I did not want to take. Forgive me, O Gracious One; for I have been closing my ears and eyes for too long. I have learned that miracles are only called miracles because they are often witnessed by only those who can can see through all of life’s illusions. I am ready to see what really exists on other side, what exists behind the blinds, and taste all the ugly fruit instead of all that looks right, plump and ripe.”

“Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire.”

“How strange, Royce thought, that, after emerging victorious from more than a hundred real battles, the greatest moment of triumph he had ever known had come to him on a mock battlefield where he’d stood alone, unhorsed, and defeated. This morning, his life had seemed as bleak as death. Tonight, he held joy in his arms. Someone or something—fate or fortune or Jenny’s God—had looked down upon him this morning and seen his anguish. And, for some reason, Jenny had been given back to him.Closing his eyes, Royce brushed a kiss against her smooth forehead. Thank you, he thought.And in his heart, he could have sworn he heard a voice answer, You’re welcome.”

“The scriptures present a God who delights in genocide, rape, slavery, and the execution of nonconformists, and for millennia those writings were used to rationalize the massacre of infidels, the ownership of women, the beating of children, dominion over animals, and the persecution of heretics and homosexuals. Humanitarian reforms such as the elimination of cruel punishment, the dissemination of empathy-inducing novels, and the abolition of slavery were met with fierce opposition in their time by ecclesiastical authorities and their apologists. The elevation of parochial values to the realm of the sacred is a license to dismiss other people’s interests, and an imperative to reject the possibility of compromise.”

“The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.”

“Don’t sit back and wait for God to do it all. Ask for His advice, but be prepared to do the hard yards yourself.”

“وكلمة ( الحمد لله ) هذه هي الصيغة التي علمنا الله أن نحمده بها ، وإلا فلو ترك لنا حرية التعبير عن الحمد ولم يحدد لنا صيغة نحمده ونشكره بها لاختلف الخلق في الحمد حسب قدراتهم و تمكنهم من الأداء ، وحسب الله قدرتهم على استيعاب النعم ، ولوجدنا البليغ صاحب القدرة الأدائية أفصح من العيي والأمي . فتحمل عنا جميعًا هذه الصيغة ، وجعلها متساوية للجميع ، الكل يقول ( الحمد لله ) البليغ يقولها ، و العيي يقولها ، و الأمي يقولها.”

“When I stand before thee at the day’s end, thou shalt see my scars and know that I had my wounds and also my healing.”