28 Quotes by Sheldon Vanauken

But I was not obeying the first and greatest commandment – to love God first – nor is it clear that I was obeying the second – to love my neighbour. Hating the oppressors of my neighbour isn’t perhaps quite what Christ had in mind.

If it’s half as good as the half we’ve known, here’s Hail! to the rest of the road.

Between the probable and proved there yawns A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns Our only hope: to leap into the Word That opens up the shuttered universe.

But Love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed in wisdom.

It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don’t know at all that it is the same with others.

A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena’s growl to be a lion’s; but when he hears the lion’s growl, he knows damn well it’s a lion.

God gives us many gifts, but never permanence; that we must seek in his arms.

It is not possible to be ‘incidentally a Christian.’ The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances.

Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one’s life will eventually be known to have been one or the other.