John Derbyshire Quotes

Being Christlike guarantees that you'll have the most important friend of all: the Savior. He knows what it's like to be misunderstood, lonely, and rejected.

People find meaning and redemption in the most unusual human connections.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

There is no person that love cannot heal; there is no soul that love cannot save.

If the human condition were the periodic table, maybe love would be hydrogen at No. 1. Death would be helium at No. 2. Power, I reckon, would be where oxygen is.

It would be really wonderful if people connected to the loneliness of what it means to be a human being in the world today.

We live in bodies that are fearfully and wonderfully made, yet they are not immune to illness and pain. We have hearts that are capable of experiencing great love, but sometimes they get broken.

' Daisies' is about a guy touching dead people and bringing them back to life. It's kind of morbid, you know. But there's a love to it. There's a kind-heartedness to it that I think makes it - I don't know; it's a good thing to put out there in the world, so I'm glad people responded.

The poet complains or points out the discontent that lies at the heart of man, the individual man, and how can that be redeemed?

With Pablo, I lose my reason, and with me, he loses his head; and then all that's left is a man pursued by justice and a woman pursued by the media who know and take care of and need each other, despite the pain caused by all the absences, all his crimes and her sins.

To Tennessee Williams we owe a special debt. In a tragic age, he has transformed loneliness by naming it for us, suffered sordidness with beauty, graced poor hurt lives with love and pity.

Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.

If we can still love those who have made us suffer, we love them all the more.

Life is full of painful events, and people who have lost their way and hurt others. Our pain is not lessened when we respond with hatred. In fact, the opposite occurs: When we hate people who hurt us, we come to resemble what we hate, or worse, and then we suffer all the more. What is evil is our response. We have choices, and love is the most powerful eliminator of all.

It seemed a marvel to her that any mortal should suffer for lack of love, and yet she had never known a mortal who didn't feel unloved. There was enough love just in this ugly hallway, she thought, that no one should ever feel the lack of it again. She peered at the parents, imagining their hearts like machines, manufacturing surfeit upon surfeit of love for their children, and then wondered how something could be so awesome and so utterly powerless.

Sometimes you forgive people simply becuase you still want them in your life.

Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.

There's something about love that builds up and is creative. There is something about hate that tears down and is destructive. So love your enemies.

Don't ever let anyone pull you so low as to hate them. We must use the weapon of love. We must have the compassion and understanding for those who hate us. We must realize so many people are taught to hate us that they are not totally responsible for their hate. But we stand in life at midnight; we are always on the threshold of a new dawn.

This is the most profound spiritual truth I know: that even when we're most sure that love can't conquer all, it seems to anyway. It goes down into the rat hole with us, in the guise of our friends, and there it swells and comforts. It gives us second winds, third winds, hundredth winds.

Without your wounds where would your power be? It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women. The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children on earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living. In Love’s service, only wounded soldiers can serve. Physician, draw back.

Love is the medicine of all moral evil. By it the world is to be cured of sin.

Love as a concrete foundation for an authentically functional civilization requires the around-the-clock labors of forgiveness. Without it, Love fails, Friendship fails, Intelligence fails, Humanity: fails.

I used to think JESUS motivated us with ultimatums, but now I know He pursues us in LOVE.