I think we honour God more if we gratefully accept the life that he gives us with all its blessings, loving it and drinking it to the full, and also grieving deeply and sincerely when we have impaired or wasted any of the good things of life (some people denounce such an attitude, and think it is bourgeois, weak, and sensitive), than if we are insensitive to life's blessings and may therefore also be insensitive to pain.

Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.

I'm not happy all the time, and I wouldn't want to be because that would make me a shallow person. But I do try to find the good in everybody.

Yet many times I felt terribly alone and was convinced that no one else understood. And I still think that's true. When our pain becomes intense and endures for weeks without relief, no one else really knows. I'm not sure it's worthwhile for them to know what it's like. They care. That's what I think is important.

Our life is...a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment.

In our own woundedness, we can become sources of life for others.

Anybody who's ever gone through a hard time - any outsider's perception, no matter how much information they're given, they have no idea what the person's life is like.

The Christian life is not about finding safety and comfort; it's about finding yourself in a dangerous place of vulnerable compassion.

The problem I have with haters is that they see my glory, but they don't know my story.

If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all.

Overcome as much as you can—nay even more than you can—the sensitiveness of your mind and check the copious flow of your tears. Else your deep affection for your nephew may be construed by unbelievers as indicating despair of God. You must regretim not as dead but as absent. You must seem to be looking for him rather than have lost him.

Oh, unheard of compassion of the apostle! In seeking to make the Jews Christians, he himself became a Jew! For he could not have persuaded the luxurious to become temperate if he had not himself become luxurious like them;