If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
如果我们发现自己内心有一个渴望,不是这世间所能满足的,最可能的解释是,我们的存在是为了另一世界。
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
Man is not the center. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.
人不是宇宙的中心。上帝不是为了人而存在,人也不是为了自己而存在。
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell.
You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
A cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.
一个冷漠、自义的道学先生,尽管经常上教堂,他可能比一个妓女更接近地狱。
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
基督徒不认为,因为我们是良善的,所以上帝爱我们;
而是因为祂爱我们,他使我们成为良善的。
Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.
那些恨恶良善的人,有时倒比那些对良善一无所知却又自命良善的人,更接近良善。
The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
成为一个基督徒,就是宽恕那不可宽恕的,因为上帝已经宽恕了你生命里不可宽恕的一切。
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
教育若失去了价值观的层次,不管它多么有用,都只能塑造一个更聪明的妖魔。
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.