Yes, God does expect us to live holy, consecrated lives. But not even the best of our intentions can make it happen. Thankfully, He doesn’t expect us to make ourselves holy. He just wants us to learn to depend on Him to make us holy.

There is nothing wrong with America that faith, love of freedom, intelligence, and energy of her citizens cannot cure.

A saint serves others, knowing that the more one serves, the greater the opportunity for the Spirit to sanctify and purify.

Risk is a part of God’s game, alike for men and nations.

Surely God would not have created such a being as man, with an ability to grasp the infinite, to exist only for a day! No, no, man was made for immortality.

Christians are not limited to any church.

As long as your intentions are solid and about growth and progression and being productive and not being idle, then you’re doing good in my book.

Prayer is not asking. It is a longing of the soul. It is daily admission of one’s weakness. It is better in prayer to have a heart without words than words without a heart.

I think that is a better thing than thanksgiving: thanks-living. How is this to be done? By a general cheerfulness of manner, by an obedience to the command of Him by whose mercy we live, by a perpetual, constant delighting of ourselves in the Lord, and by a submission of our desires to His will.

In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God’s existence.

I don’t believe in an outside agent that creates the world, then walks away. But I feel very strongly there is an intelligence at work in every flower, in every blade of grass, in every cell of my body. And it is that intelligence that, I wouldn’t say created the universe. It is creating the universe. It’s an ongoing process.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Do I think faith will be an important part of being a good president? Yes, I do.

Think of what you are, you Christians. You are God’s children; you are joint heirs with Christ. The ‚many mansions‘ are for you; the palms and harps of the glorified are for you. You have a share in all that Christ has and is and shall be.

If I had to choose a religion, the sun as the universal giver of life would be my god.

Where love is, there God is also.

The gods‘ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.

If God created us in his own image, we have more than reciprocated.

It says nothing against the ripeness of a spirit that it has a few worms.

I was always respectful of people who were deeply religious because I always felt that if they gave themselves to it, then it had to be important to them. But if you can go through life without it, that’s OK, too. It’s whatever suits you.

Knowing that the time to sleep has come, the Lord sleeps, and does well in sleeping. Often, when we have been fretting and worrying, we should have glorified God far more had we literally gone to sleep.

A man of courage is also full of faith.

Our prayers should be for blessings in general, for God knows best what is good for us.

Right now, we don’t have a very good relation with creation.

There is nothing in this world that can compare with the Christian fellowship; nothing that can satisfy but Christ.

Dignity, and even holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than some people imagine.

Obedience to God is the pathway to the life you really want to live.

Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in it and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man.

Worshipping the Lord means giving Him the place that he must have; worshipping the Lord means stating, believing – not only by our words – that He alone truly guides our lives; worshipping the Lord means that we are convinced before Him that He is the only God, the God of our lives, the God of our history.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

A church is a place in which gentlemen who have never been to heaven brag about it to persons who will never get there.

Well look, I mean, I think that prayer and holy water, and things like that are all fine. They don’t do any good, but they don’t necessarily do any harm. It’s touching to be thought of in that way. It makes up for those who tell me that I’ve got my just desserts.

Cast away your sloth, your lethargy, your coldness, or whatever interferes with your chaste and pure love for Christ, your soul’s husband. Make Him the source, the center, and the circumference of all your soul’s range of delight.

We can never learn too much of His will towards us, too much of His messages and His advice. The Bible is His word and its study gives at once the foundation for our faith and an inspiration to battle onward in the fight against the tempter.

Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.

It doesn’t matter who likes you or doesn’t like you, all that matters is that God likes you. He accepts you, he approves of you.

God writes the Gospel not in the Bible alone, but also on trees, and in the flowers and clouds and stars.

Humans cannot avoid trying to influence others. Everything we say or do is examined and interpreted by others for clues as to our intentions.

Faith is a state of openness or trust.

Religion is a matter of the heart. No physical inconvenience can warrant abandonment of one’s own religion.

When I hear Mitt Romney say that he believes that Jesus is the Son of God, that He’s the Christ, raised from the dead, that He’s his savior – that’s good enough for me.

God made me and broke the mold.

It’s in the difficult times that we’re growing and you can’t just rebuke everything hard. We’ve got to endure it and fight the good fight of faith and pass the test.

Great thoughts and a pure heart, that is what we should ask from God.

To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

I am a Catholic.

So live with men as if God saw you and speak to God, as if men heard you.

I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person’s life. God is in everyone’s life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else – God is in this person’s life. You can – you must – try to seek God in every human life.

When men do not have healthy notions of the Divinity, false ideas supplant them, just as in bad times one uses counterfeit money when there is no good money.

I do not concern myself with gods and spirits either good or evil nor do I serve any.

Each one of them is Jesus in disguise.

Sincere Christians can disagree about the details of Scripture and theology – absolutely.

There are many, many Christians who practice Buddhism, and they become better and better Christians all the time.

It’s not the tools that you have faith in – tools are just tools. They work, or they don’t work. It’s people you have faith in or not. Yeah, sure, I’m still optimistic I mean, I get pessimistic sometimes but not for long.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

I believe God wants you to have money to pay your bills, send your kids to college and do charity work and build orphanages. There’s the teaching that we’re supposed to be poor to show that we’re humble. I don’t buy that. I think we’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to excel.

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the blood of Christ: all of us, not just Catholics. Everyone! ‚Father, the atheists?‘ Even the atheists. Everyone!

When all is said and done, what constitutes the impregnable superiority of Christianity over all other types of Faith is that it is ever more consciously identified with a Christogenesis: in other words, with an awareness of the rise of a certain universal Presence which is at once immortalizing and unifying.

I do put a lot of God in my music, but not because I’m super religious. There are a lot of demons in my music, too. I acknowledge both.

For what shall it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul?