Quotes about Hope

If I could see the abolition of slavery... I would sing my nunc dimittis with joy.

When everything is blocked off,' I was told by a dear friend who lives in Erfurt, "one must try to live in the interstices.' Apparently, the Christians of the Apocalypse, though they did not bear the sign of the beast, had discovered or created such spaces. From islands like these, true culture, Christian culture, may spread across the earth. Many people are athirst for it.

God loves us, not such as we are by our merit, but such as we will be by his own gift.

Perfection lies in fullness of journey. For this reason, never think you have arrived. Forget what lies behind you, reach out for what lies before you. Through the very change in which you lose what you have snatched up you will at last be transformed into what you crave for with such longing.

God is so wide that, within his spaciousness, even the longing for unfulfillable longing can soar freely.

Wonder—the enthusiastic ardor for the sublimity of being, for its worthiness to be an object of knowledge—promises to become the point of departure for genuine insight only where it has reached the stage in which the subject, overwhelmed by the object, has, as it were, fused into a single point or into nothing… like the movement of hope and love toward God, which is genuine and selfless only where it has assumed the attitude of pure worship of God for his own sake.

God is not, in the first place, 'absolute power', but 'absolute love'.

For many of us, we will come to the point where death will be the only healer for the pain which our lives will have come to contain.

Bad things do happen to good people in this world, but it is not God who wills it. God would like people to get what they deserve in life, but He cannot always arrange it. Forced to choose between a good God who is not totally powerful, or a powerful God who is not totally good, the author of the Book of Job chooses to believe in God's goodness.

As the Persian poet Rumi once wrote, 'Light enters at the place of the wound.

What God does is promise us, I will be with you; you will feel burdened but you will never feel abandoned.

Instead of exhausting ourselves trying to reshape the world to fit our dreams, we are better off using our strength to comfort one another in a world that is almost certain to mock our dreams and break our hearts.