Everyone has noticed how hard it is to turn our thoughts to God when everything is going well with us… While what we call ‚our own life‘ remains agreeable, we will not surrender it to Him. What, then, can God do in our interests but make ‚our own life‘ less agreeable to us, and take away the plausible sources of false happiness?

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

To love someone means to see him as God intended him.

Self-actualized people are independent of the good opinion of others.

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.

All gods are homemade, and it is we who pull their strings, and so, give them the power to pull ours.

Every great person is always being helped by everybody; for their gift is to get good out of all things and all persons.

I change during the course of a day. I wake and I’m one person, and when I go to sleep I know for certain I’m somebody else.

We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man’s features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

I know my flaws before other people point them out to me.

Every one of my regrets has produced a song I’m proud of.

Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul.

My father wasn’t around when I was a kid, and I used to always say, ‚Why me? Why don’t I have a father? Why isn’t he around? Why did he leave my mother?‘ But as I got older I looked deeper and thought, ‚I don’t know what my father was going through, but if he was around all the time, would I be who I am today?‘

Life is too short for long-term grudges.

Whatever I will become will be what God has chosen for me.

I try to look on all the great things God’s done, and not focus on the negative. It’s a perspective.

I am radically, insanely, nutty in love with Jesus!

My message is that God is a good God.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.

To say that you can kill in the name of God is blasphemy.

We’re all put on this earth to walk in His image, the Master.

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.

I’ve always written. There’s a journal which I kept from about 9 years old. The man who gave it to me lived across the street from the store and kept it when my grandmother’s papers were destroyed. I’d written some essays. I loved poetry, still do. But I really, really loved it then.

I feel that sin and evil are the negative part of you, and I think it’s like a battery: you’ve got to have the negative and the positive in order to be a complete person.

Unless I am both capable of and willing to reopen the wound every time I write a song, if I choose to not look inside myself to write music, I’m really not worth being called an artist at all.

The first fresh hour of every morning should be dedicated to the Lord, whose mercy gladdens it with golden light.

I am not happy, and the quest for happiness as a principal objective is not part of my world. Of course, ever since I can remember, I have done what I felt like doing.

Hell is yourself and the only redemption is when a person puts himself aside to feel deeply for another person.

I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of, such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.

To enjoy freedom we have to control ourselves.

The last thing the devil wants you to do is be an obedient Christian.

Sometimes, I feel like one who is on the sidelines, who has missed life itself.

The greatest and most important problems of life are all fundamentally insoluble. They can never be solved but only outgrown.

As a member of the Church, you have made sacred covenants with the Lord.

Keep your nose out the sky, keep your heart to god, and keep your face to the raising sun.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

When I was four, my mother insisted I get out of the car and find my own way home. Although I got lost, I did find my way home. It taught me the value of independence at an early age.

Many a man thinks he is patient when, in reality, he is indifferent.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

If I wouldn’t have found Courtney, I probably would have carried on with a bisexual lifestyle.

If any of you should ask me for an epitome of the Christian religion, I should say that it is in one word – prayer. Live and die without prayer, and you will pray long enough when you get to hell.

I answer only to God.

Oh, these vast, calm, measureless mountain days, days in whose light everything seems equally divine, opening a thousand windows to show us God.

The highest reward that God gives us for good work is the ability to do better work.

The most intense conflicts, if overcome, leave behind a sense of security and calm that is not easily disturbed. It is just these intense conflicts and their conflagration which are needed to produce valuable and lasting results.

We are twice armed if we fight with faith.

Trust and value your own divinity as well as your connection to nature. Seeing God’s work everywhere will be your reward.

The revealed Word awakened me, but it was the preached Word that saved me, and I must ever attach peculiar value to the hearing of the truth, for by it I received the joy and peace in which my soul delights.

I was born with a great gift, and sometimes with that comes a destructive streak.

I’ve been called a moron since I was about four. My father called me a moron. My grandfather said I was a moron. And a lot of times when I’m driving, I hear I’m a moron. I like being a moron.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

Man is not born to atheism. He is born to believe.

Miracles do not, in fact, break the laws of nature.

Not everyone loves me, but I have to be okay no matter what they think about me.

Only God who made us can touch us and change us and save us from ourselves.

I am who I am. That’s why my friends and peers respect and appreciate me. I don’t change or cater my actions to fit my surroundings. I’m myself 24/7. People appreciate that.

I’m always just surprised when someone writes something about me.

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‚I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.‘

I used to let other people’s struggles affect my happiness. If they weren’t happy, there was no way I was going to be happy. The opposite was also true: If I wasn’t happy, I didn’t want anyone around me to be happy.