John Bunyan Quotes

Sometimes you can't see your way out. The "dark night of the soul" - it's a reality for many, many people.

As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place, where was a den; and I laid me down in that place to sleep: and as I slept I dreamed a dream. I dreamed, and behold I saw a man clothed with rags, standing in a certain place, with his face from his own house, a book in his hand, and a great burden upon his back. I looked, and saw him open the book, and read therein; and as he read, he wept and trembled: and not being able longer to contain, he brake out with a lamentable cry; saying, 'What shall I do?'

As always at these times when he felt really in need of God the front of his mind was serene, but the deeper part, where faith did constant battle with doubt, was terrified that there would be no answer.

God is shaking me.

I got to that desperate place where nobody could help me but God.

My principal anguish, and the wellspring of all my joys and sorrows, has been the incessant merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh.

For me, a spiritual and existential crisis is the same thing in that your foundation gets rocked.

I am gripped by an existential panic.

There is no dignity like the dignity of a soul in agony.

I think about God, yes, and I wonder if there is a God. And if there is a God, will God please help me through my hard trips.

During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me. I had always owned them to be the Word of GOD . . . the careful reading of the Acts afforded me a practical picture of the early church; which made me feel deeply the contrast with its actual present state; though still, as ever beloved by GOD.

Sometimes I think my soul is full of weeds!

Spiritual emptiness is a universal disease.

Ye immortal gods! where in the world are we?

It is excruciating to be an unbeliever with a spirit that is deeply religious.

To every man who struggles with his own soul in mystery, a book that is a book flowers once, and seeds, and is gone.

Save me from this road I'm on, Jesus take the wheel.

It is only in the depths of crisis and despair that the fear of losing one's personality breeds millennial hopes of rescue: otherwise, complacency prevails.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

You don't go through a deep personal transformation without some kind of dark night of the soul.

Perhaps, the answer is that my ravaged mind rails against the idea of God, but something deeper in me calls out as if God might answer. 'There are not foxholes,' I guess, and depression is the deepest and deadliest foxhole I've been in. It may be the 'dark night of the soul' that the mystics talk about but in depression it is not so much that one becomes lost in the dark as one becomes the dark.

We do not pray at all until we are at our wits' end.