Abbey > Abbey's Quotes

“God creates out of nothing. Wonderful you say. Yes, to be sure, but he does what is still more wonderful: he makes saints out of sinners.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, The Journals of Kierkegaard

“He who has not God in himself cannot feel His absence.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Humility is attentive patience.”
― Simone Weil

“There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“But we can be nearly sure that those whose love for God has caused their pure loves here below to disappear are false friends of God.   Our neighbour, our friends, religious ceremonies and the beauty of the world do not fall in rank to unreal things after direct contact between God and the soul. On the contrary, only then do these things become real. Previously, they were half-dreams. Previously, they had no reality.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“The man who has known pure joy, if only for a moment ... is the only man for whom affliction is something devastating. At the same time he is the only man who has not deserved the punishment. But, after all, for him it is no punishment; it is God holding his hand and pressing rather hard. For, if he remains constant, what he will discover buried deep under the sound of his own lamentations is the pearl of the silence of God.”
― Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

“Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Cut away ruthlessly everything that is imaginary in your feelings.”
― Simone Weil, Simone Weil: An Anthology

“The love we feel for the splendor of the heavens, the plains, the sea, and the mountains, for the silence of nature which is borne in upon us by thousands of tiny sounds, for the breath of the winds or the warmth of the sun, this love of which every human being has at least an inkling, is an incomplete, painful love, because it is felt for things incapable of responding, that is to say for matter. Men want to turn this same love toward a being who is like themselves and capable of answering to their love, of saying yes, of surrendering...
The longing to love the beauty of the world in a human being is essentially the longing for the Incarnation.”
― Simone Weil, Waiting for God

“All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“It is only necessary to know that love is a direction and not a state of the soul. If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction. He whose soul remains ever turned toward God though the nail pierces it finds himself nailed to the very center of the universe. It is the true center; it is not in the middle; it is beyond space and time; it is God.”
― Simone Weil, Love in the Void: Where God Finds Us

“Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.
"That is the way," he said.
"But there are no stairs."
"You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”
― George MacDonald, The Golden Key

“Life only demands from you the strength you possess.”
― Dag Hammarskjold

“Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld

“You've got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn't; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare

“No one should be surprised at the difficulty of faith, if there is some part of his life where he is consciously resisting or disobeying the commandment of Jesus. Is there some part of your life which you are refusing to surrender at his behest, some sinful passion, maybe, or some animosity, some hope, perhaps your ambition or your reason? ... How can you hope to enter into communion with him when at some point in your life you are running away from him?”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“Be patient in prayer, even though you should do nothing all your life but wait in patience, with a heart humbled, abandoned, resigned, and content for the return of your Beloved. Oh, excellent prayer! How it moves the heart of God, and obliges Him to return more than anything else!”
― Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon

“All consolation that does not come from God is but desolation; when the soul has learned to receive no comfort but in God only, it has passed beyond the reach of desolation.”
― Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon

“You would not think any duty small,
If you yourself were great.”
― George MacDonald, Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2

“As the calm lake stems from the deep spring that no eye saw, so too a person's love has a still deeper ground, in God's love. If there were no gushing spring at the bottom, if Hod were not love, then neither would there be the little lake nor either a person's love. As the calm lake stems darkly from the deep spring, so a person's love originate mysteriously in God's. As the calm lake indeed invites you to contemplate it, yet with the darkness of the reflection prevents you from seeing through it, so does love's mysterious origin in God's love prevent you from seeing its ground. When you think you see it, it is a reflection that deceives you, as if what only hides the deeper ground were itself the ground.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

“Impossibilities “I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.”—“No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of God! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God’s beginnings do not look like his endings, but they are like; the oak is in the acorn, though we cannot see it.”
― George MacDonald, George MacDonald: The Complete Novels

“No one, however strong he may feel his obligations, will ever be man
enough to fulfill them except that he be a Christian-that is,one who,
like Christ, cares first for the will of the Father.”
― George MacDonald, The Baron's Apprenticeship

“But in truth there was more expression in the flower than was yet in the face. The flower expressed what God was thinking of when He made it; the face, what the girl was thinking of her self. When she ceased thinking of herself, then, like the flower, she would show what God was thinking of when he made her.”
― George MacDonald, The Peasant Girl's Dream

“Look around you--there are people around you. Maybe you will remember one of them all your life and later eat your heart out because you didn't make use of the opportunity to ask him questions. And the less you talk, the more you'll hear. Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of the Archipelago. They intertwine, touch one another for one night only in just such a clickety-clacking half-dark car as this and then separate once and for all. Put your ear to their quiet humming and the steady clickety-clack beneath the car. After all, it is the spinning wheel of life that is clicking and clacking away there.”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“For He regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“But have you ever tried this way, husband and wife? Have you ever got alone and said, 'Come, Oh let us go and humble our souls before God together, let us go into our chamber and humble our souls before God for our sin, by which we have abused those mercies that God has taken away from us, and we have provoked God against us. Oh let us charge ourselves with our sin, and be humbled before the Lord together.'? Have you tried such a way as this? Oh you would find that the cloud would be taken away, and the sun would shine in upon you, and you would have a great deal more contentment than ever you had.”
― Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment

“Those are not the tears of repentance!... Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“Two things destroy the peace and tranquility of our lives; our bewailing past disappointments, or fearing future ones.”
― John Flavel, The Mystery of Providence