Quotes about Resistance

Where there is no opposition to evil, it multiplies.

Now, we can't stop the devil from coming against us, but we can overcome him each time - if we exercise the authority of Jesus and decide not to put up with him.

The fact is, we will all be broken—sooner or later. We can choose to be broken or we can wait for God to crush our pride. If we resist the means God provides to lead us to brokenness, we do not avoid brokenness—we simply make it necessary for God to intensify and prolong the process.

Merely to resist evil with evil by hating those who hate us and seeking to destroy them, is actually no resistance at all. It is active and purposeful collaboration in evil that brings the Christian into direct and intimate contact with the same source of evil and hatred which inspires the acts of his enemy. It leads in practice to a denial of Christ and to the service of hatred rather than love.

This, then, is our desert: to live facing despair, but not to consent. Merton, Thomas. Thoughts In Solitude (p. 8). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

Why should anyone be shattered by the thought of hell? It is not compulsory for anyone to go there. Those who do, do so by their own choice, and against the will of God, and they can only get into hell by defying and resisting all the work of Providence and grace. It is their own will that takes them there, not God's.

I have come to think that care of the soul requires a high degree of resistance to the culture around us, simply because that culture is dedicated to values that have no concern for the soul.

Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

Oh, Adam's sons, how cleverly you defend yourselves against all that might do you good!

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

The Indians' insistence on clinging to their customs had to be the work of Satan there was no other explanation which is why the friars went out to hunt down and lasso the deserters and then whipped their doctrine of love and forgiveness into them.

Even a genius cannot completely resist his Zeitgeist, the spirit of his time.