Whether we're looking at the burial box of St. James, a fragment of the True Cross, the Shroud of Turin, or some bones supposedly belonging to John the Baptist, there is always excitement and distrust, faith and doubt.

To me, nothing ever feels like a sure thing. I cling to that because it's very important you don't ever think anything is a sure thing.

Totally without hope one cannot live. To live without hope is to cease to live. Hell is hopelessness. It is no accident that above the entrance to Dante's hell is the inscription: Leave behind all hope, you who enter here.

God has not the slightest need for our proofs.

Everyone who must contend with unbelief should be advised that he ought not to take his own unbelief too seriously. Only faith is to be taken seriously; and if we have faith as a grain of mustard seed, that suffices for the devil to have lost his game.

Faith is rather a freedom, a permission. It is permitted to be so—that the believer in God's Word may hold on to this Word in everything, in spite of all that contradicts it.

God is a dark night to man in this life.

The man who will live above his present circumstances, is in great danger of soon living beneath them; or as the Italian proverb says, "The man that lives by hope, will die by despair.

As long as hope does not embrace and transform the thought and action of men, it remains topsy-turvy and ineffective.

My faith in man is, at bottom, a faith in God.

One of the greatest of all principles is that men can do what they think they can do.

True faith nor biddeth nor abideth form, The bended knee, the eye uplift; is all Which men need render; all which God can bear. What to the faith are forms? A passing speck, A crow upon the sky.