“The weight of the world is on our shoulders, its vision is throughour eyes; if we blink or look aside, or turn back to finger what Plato said or remember Napoleon and his conquests, we inflicton the world the injury of some obliquity. This is life…”

“How is it that we carry the weight of the world on our shoulders, but we have to get it off our chest?”

“We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? . . .I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something.”

“The weight of the world is a trifle, if we all put our two fingers under it and try to lift together.”

“We must not allow the things of the world to blinker our vision of the eternal destination. Nor must we permit the “voices in the world” to lead us off course. Rather, we must allow the hope of Christ’s glory and of eternal life to rest in our minds forever. We must reaffirm the goal that matters most and press toward it “looking forward with an eye of faith.”

“We depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. We look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. We arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need — but are at constant risk of forgetting what we need — within. We turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves.”