John Owen Quotes

My life is such a contradiction. My soul yearns for holiness and then runs from the mortification necessary to attain it.

AFFLICTION, n. An acclimatizing process preparing the soul for another and bitter world.

A religious life is a struggle and not a hymn.

I could not have gone through the awful wretched mess of life without having left a stain upon the silence.

It is the suffering of ambivalence: the murderous alternation between bitter resentment and raw-edged nerves, and blissful gratification and tenderness

I live with that contradiction daily. It is a constant struggle. I struggle very deeply. I don't think I've said this to anyone, but I've wondered if I just want to give up this world and live in the Congo and just be there. But I don't think that's what they need from me.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

Nothing can render affliction so insupportable as the load of sin. Would you then be fitted for afflictions? Be sure to get the burden of your sins laid aside, and then what affliction soever you may meet with will be very easy to you.

Life is so damned hard, so damned hard... It just hurts people and hurts people, until finally it hurts them so that they can't be hurt ever any more. That's the last and worst thing it does.

Sometimes the darkness lives inside you, and sometimes it wins.

I suffer from a spiritual malaise which manifests itself in outbursts of vicious rage.

The agony of a man's affliction is often necessary to put him into the right mood to face the fundamental things of life. The Psalmist says: "Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now have I kept Thy Word.

It's a hard place this world can be. No wonder a baby cries coming in to it. Tears from the start

I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! However, if I must suffer, I will endeavour to suffer in silence. There is certainly a great defect in my mind my wayward heart creates its own misery Why I am made thus I cannot tell; and, till I can form some idea of the whole of my existence, I must be content to weep and dance like a child long for a toy, and be tired of it as soon as I get it.

Saw so much of the wickedness of my heart that I longed to get away from myself...I felt almost pressed to death with my own vileness. Oh what a body of death is there in me...Oh the closest walk with God is the sweetest heaven that can be enjoyed on earth!

I've crossed lines of word and wire and both have cut me deep. I've been frozen out and I've been on fire, and the tears are mine to weep.

I can't shove the dark out of my way.

I may have looked happy but inside I was hopelessly depressed.

I wondered why life had to suck so hard sometimes.

Sorrow is Mount Sinai. If one will, one may go up and talk with God, face to face.

The heart of a Christian, like the moon, commonly suffers an eclipse when it is at the full, and that by the interposition of the earth.

Thus with my lips have I denounced you, while my heart, bleeding within me, called you tender names. It was love lashed by its own self that spoke. It was pride half slain that fluttered in the dust. It was my hunger for your love that raged from the housetop, while my own love, kneeling in silence, prayed your forgiveness.

All the trials we endure cannot be compared to these interior battles.

In other words, it was a struggle with himself. And the product of that struggle: anger, bitterness, resentment, envy or transformation, aspiration, hope, decency..the product of that struggle is the quality of your life and the nature of your soul.