“It is the wretched way people have of setting up a claim to happiness that ruins everything in this world. A man will make progress if he can get rid of this claim and desire nothing but what he sees before him .”

“He would find a way to make it work, because he finally understood that sometimes you have to raise your expectations. And sometimes you need to make a claim on the world and the people you love to get what you most desire”

“A man´s desire is a powerful thing. It can reduce a strong man to nothing. When he sees a woman who fascinates him, he will give up everything for her.”

“Everything belonged to him--but that was a trifle. The thing to know was what he belonged to, how many powers of darkness claimed him for their own.”

“I knowed a man in Paphlagonia who'd swallow a live snake every morning, when he got up. He used to say, he was certain of one thing, that nothing worse would happen to him all day. 'Course they made him eat a bowlful of hairy centipedes before they hung him, so maybe that claim was a bit presumptive.”

“When one takes into account also His reiterated assertions about His Divinity - such as asking us to love Him above parents, to believe in Him even in the face of persecution, to be ready to sacrifice our bodies in order to save our souls in union with Him - to call Him just a good man ignores the facts. No man is good unless he is humble; and humility is a recognition of truth concerning oneself. A man who thinks he is greater than he actually is is not humble, but a vain and boastful fool. How can any man claim prerogatives over conscience, and over history, and over society and the world and still claim he is 'meek and humble of heart'? But if He is God as well as man, His language falls into place and everything that He says is intelligible. But if He is not what He claimed to be, then some of His most precious sayings are nothing but bombastic outburts of self-adulation that breathe rather the spirit of Lucifer than the spirit of a good man. What avails Him to proclam the law of self-renouncement, if He Himself renounces truth to call Himself God? Even His sacrifice on the Cross becomes a suspect and dated thing, when it goes hand in hand with delusions of grandeur and infernal conceit. He could not be called even a sincere teacher, for no sincere teacher would allow anyone to construe his claims to share the rank and the name of the Great God in heaven.”