Quotes about Hope

What torments of grief you endured, from evils that never arrived.

Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

That is why faith, wherever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience. It does not calm the unquiet heart, but is itself this unquiet heart in man. Those who hope in Christ can no longer put up with reality as it is, but begin to suffer under it, to contradict it. Peace with God means conflict with the world, for the goad of the promised future stabs inexorably into the flesh of every unfulfilled present.

Believing in the resurrection does not just mean assenting to a dogma and noting a historical fact. It means participating in this creative act of God's … Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn't point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one.

Faith] sees in the resurrection of Christ not the eternity of heaven, but the future of the very earth on which his cross stands. It sees in him the future of the very humanity for which he died. That is why it finds the cross the hope of the earth.

Believing in Christ's resurrection therefore does not mean affirming a fact. It means being possessed by the life-giving Spirit and participating in the powers of the age to come.

In the cross of Christ God is taking man dead-seriously so that he may open up for him the happy freedom of Easter. God takes upon himself the pain of negation and the God forsakenness of judgement to reconcile himself with his enemies and to give the godless fellowship with himself. ~ Theology of Play, p.33

For resurrection faith means courage to revolt against the covenant with death (Isa. 28:15), it means hope for the victory of life which shall swallow up and conquer life-devouring death. ~ p.14

Resistance is the protest of those who hope, and hope is the feast of the people who resist.

In the raising and exaltation of Christ, God has chosen the one whom the moral and political powers of this world rejected — the poor, humiliated, suffering and forsaken Christ. God identified himself with him and made him Lord of the new world ….. The God who creates justice for those who suffer violence, the God who exalts the humiliated and executed Christ — that is the God of hope for the new world of righteousness and justice and peace.

Faith means believing in what you do even when it does not bear visible fruit.

It was no longer a matter of growing a fat crop, only of growing enough for the seed not to die out. There will be another year, he consoled himself, another summer in which to try again.