God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world

I'd realized that in writing happiness is useless-without suffering there is no story.

There are no crown-bearers in heaven who were not cross-bearers here below.

Pain is nothing, just a warning signal from the body to the brain. Pain is no more the real thing than an X-ray photograph is the real thing. Biut of course he is wrong.

Imagine if the electric chair or gas chamber had people kneeling around it with no thought of the horrific purpose it once held! But in effect, this is exactly what happened with the cross. No other religion in history has ever used an emblem of horror for its enduring brand. Whether we want to or not, all of us must pick up some kind of cross and follow Jesus into suffering.

The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.

The soul that loves and suffers is in the sublime state.

Thoughtful minds make little use of this expression: the happy and the unhappy. In this world, clearly a vestibule of another, no one is happy.

human loves are absolutely necessary as steps toward the Divine, and no soul is prepared to partake of Divine Love until it has become capable of the deepest and most intense human love. It is only by passing through human loves and human sufferings that Divine Love is reached and realized.

Each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ.

Jesus has now many lovers of the heavenly kingdom but few bearers of His cross.

If thou art willing to suffer no adversity, how wilt thou be the friend of Christ?