“My longings, my hopes, my dreams, and my every effort has been to live for Him who rescued me, to study for Him who gave me this mind, to serve Him who fashioned my will, and to speak for Him who gave me a voice.”

What we need is not a religion that is right where we are right, but one that is right where we are wrong.

What does it mean to be human? It means we are created in the image of God for the glorious reality of being in permanent fellowship with Him.

Love is hard work. It is the hardest work I know of, work from which you are never entitled to take a vacation.

Respect for the right of another to be wrong does not mean that the wrong is right.

An argument may remove doubt, but only the Holy Spirit can convict of truth.

Justice is the handmaiden of truth, and when truth dies, justice is buried with it.

The ultimate test of any civilization is how we treat the most vulnerable… what we do to our children. Our world has lost its direction.

To allow God to be God we must follow Him for who He is and what He intends, and not for what we want and what we prefer.

Truth by definition excludes.

The loneliest people in the world are those who have exhausted pleasure and come away empty.

Goodness can endure a few moments; holiness is life-defining.

Jesus does not offer to make bad people good but to make dead people alive.

Does that not sound odd to you? When God decides who should live or die, he is immoral, When you decide who should live or die, it’s your moral right. There was a pin-drop silence.

The mocker will not have the last laugh. You see, dancing on the grave of an extinguished Christianity is farcical at best. Because the grave is empty. And the one who knows the way out of the grave sits in the heavens and laughs.

God put enough into the world to make faith in Him a reasonable thing. But He left enough out to make it impossible to live by reason alone.

You’ll never get to a person’s soul until you understand their hurts.

The determination in your heroic effort Will permeate your mind and heart Even after your success or failure Is long forgotten.

It takes effort to make it to forever.

It is not human nature to enjoy what we get with no effort.

I firmly believe you’re never supposed to wish for more than you’re willing to work for. Expectations should never exceed your effort.

A wealthy landowner cannot cultivate and improve his farm without spreading comfort and well-being around him. Rich and abundant crops, a numerous population and a prosperous countryside are the rewards for his efforts.

All I want is to bring you the love and the joy that matches all the pain you have ever felt.

The Booker triumph of Graham Swift’s moving, effortlessly profound Last Orders is a vindication of the quiet, much-misunderstood path this fine writer chose to take after the brilliance of Waterland more than ten years ago.

Science is the search for truth, that is the effort to understand the world: it involves the rejection of bias, of dogma, of revelation, but not the rejection of morality.