“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

The Church is the Church only when it exists for others, not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.

When all is said and done, the life of faith is nothing if not an unending struggle of the spirit with every available weapon against the flesh.

Absolute seriousness is never without a dash of humor.

Your life as a Christian should make non believers question their disbelief in God.

If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.

God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility, namely, real human beings, the real world, this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.

There is a wrong way of staying in the world and a wrong way of fleeing from it. In both cases we are fashioning ourselves according to the world.

In normal life we hardly realize how much more we receive than we give, and life cannot be rich without such gratitude. It is so easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements compared with what we owe to the help of others.

Any honours that come our way are only stolen from him to whom alone they really belong, the Lord who sent us.

If my sinfulness appears to me to be in any way smaller or less detestable in comparison with the sins of others, I am still not recognizing my sinfulness at all. How can I possibly serve another person in unfeigned humility if I seriously regard his sinfulness as worse than my own?

Jesus himself did not try to convert the two thieves on the cross; he waited until one of them turned to him.

There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.

Being free means being free for the other, because the other has bound me to him. Only in relationship with the other am I free.

The truth of the matter is that the whole world has already been turned upside down by the work of Jesus Christ.

Christianity preaches the infinite worth of that which is seemingly worthless and the infinite worthlessness of that which is seemingly so valued.

Things do exist that are worth standing up for without compromise. To me it seems that peace and social justice are such things, as is Christ himself.

The misery of keeping a dog is his dying so soon. But, to be sure, if he lived for fifty years and then died, what would become of me?

Failure is delay, but not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead-end street.

If you kin see de light at daybreak, you don’t keer if you die at dusk. It’s so many people never seen de light at all.

Flying off the handle sometimes causes hammers and humans to lose their heads, as well as their effectiveness.

And I can’t die easy thinking maybe the menfolks white or black is making a spit cup out of you. Have some sympathy for me. Put me down easy, Janie, I’m a cracked plate.

He said you were the only one who was bitter about S’s suicide and the only one who really forgave him for it. The rest of us, he said, were outwardly unbitter and inwardly unforgiving.

We don’t actually fear death, we fear that no one will notice our absence, that we will disappear without a trace.

She knew now that marriage did not make love. Janie’s first dream was dead, so she became a woman.