When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.

Tuhan, karuniailah saya ketabahan untuk menerima hal-hal yang tidak bisa saya ubah, Keberanian untuk mengubah hal-hal yang bisa saya ubah, Dan kebijaksanaan untuk membedakan keduanya.

The church has lost the chance of becoming the unifying element in our American society. It is not anticipating any facts. It is merely catching up very slowly to the new social facts created by economic and other forces. The American melting pot is doing its work. The churches merely represent various European cultures, lost in the amalgam of American life and maintaining a separate existence only in religion.

The consistent optimism of our liberal culture has prevented modern democratic societies both from gauging the perils of freedom accurately and from appreciating democracy fully as the only alternative to injustice and oppression. When this optimism is not qualified to accord with the real and complex facts of human nature and history, there is always a danger that sentimentality will give way to despair and that a too consistent optimism will alternate with a too consistent pessimism.

Change what cannot be accepted and accept what cannot be changed.

Change is the essence of life; be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.

Religion, declares the modern man, is consciousness of our highest social values. Nothing could be further from the truth. True religion is a profound uneasiness about our highest social values.

It was the strangest feeling, to be convicted but not condemned. God had torn him down but then had slowly built him back up. He had crushed him and then restored him. The more honest Clay became, the more God revealed to him the condition of his heart—a heart born into darkness, a heart that had trusted in the ways of the world.

Till you can rest in God's will you will never have rest.

M]editation is the life of of most other duties; and the view of heaven is the life of meditation (559).

Yet I must tell you, that all these graces which are expressed by passions of sorrow, fear, joy, hope, love, are not so certainly to be tried by the passion that is in them, as by the will that is either contained in them, or supposed in them; not as acts of the sensitive, but of the rational appetite (358).

Meditation puts reason in its authority and preeminence. It helpeth to deliver it form its captivity to the sense, and setteth it again upon the throne of the soul. When reason is silent, it is usually subject; for when it is asleep the senses domineer. . . . Reason is at the strongest when it is most in action. Now, meditation produceth reason into act (573).