“Confront them with annihilation, and they will then survive; plunge them into a deadly situation, and they will then live. When people fall into danger, they are then able to strive for victory.”

“Many people pray to be kept out of unexpected problems. Some people pray to be able to confront and overcome them.”

“You will find peace not by trying to escape your problems, but by confronting them courageously. You will find peace not in denial, but in victory.”

“To take a people who were traveling apace the broadway to hell, and to be able to turn them, and set their face to God. . . . It is what we must strive for.”

“The secret of survival is a defective imagination. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot, like a whiff of the most lethal sewer gas.”

“What a blessing it is to love books as I love them;- to be able to converse with the dead, and to live amidst the unreal!”