Barbara Tuchman Quotes

Christianity is a battle not a dream.

For sin is just this, what man cannot by its very nature do with his whole being; it is possible to silence the conflict in the soul, but it is not possible to uproot it.

The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation... God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The spirit desires to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

I lost the love of heaven above I spurned the lust of earth below I felt the sweets of fancied love And hell itself my only foe.

The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit's weak.

The knowledge of the cross brings a conflict of interest between God who has become man and man who wishes to become God.

I love the spiritual side of religion, but the church, for me, is a place where I feel very repressed.

I was about to be a preacher, but I was a sinner.

There is something about human nature that just doesn't want to face the reality that we live in two worlds. We live in the physical, material world where we have jobs, read books, and go about our business. And we live in a spiritual world - and that is a world at war.

Our joy ends where love of the world begins.

We cannot know what prayer is for until we know that life is war.

I don't just commit sin. Apart from God, I am sinful. My problem is not just what I do; it's who I am without His nature.

In Judaism faith means wrestling with God as Jacob once wrestled with an angel.

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

You have got me walking up and down all day under those trees, saying to me over and over again, "Solitude, solitude." And You have turned around and thrown the world in my lap. You have told me, "Leave all things and follow me," and then You have tied half of New York to my foot like a ball and chain. You have got me kneeling behind that pillar with my mind making a noise like a bank. Is that contemplation?

Do not think about sin, he thought. There are enough problems now without sin. Also I have no understanding of it.

Because if I let myself feel the pain and the anger, I think it might kill me. Or I might kill someone else. I know it's wrong to feel that way about God and I know its's wrong to not feel anything. I hate it. I don't hate God. I hate not loving Him.

How can one love the light and live in darkness?

The tragedy of being both rational and animal seems to consist in having to choose between duty and desire rather than in making any particular choice

Unless he had whiskey running through his veins, Willard came to the clearing every morning and evening to talk to God. Arvin didn't know which was worse, the drinking or the praying. As far back as he could remember, it seemed that his father had fought the Devil all the time.

Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh, for the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other: so that ye cannot do the things that ye would.

You do not know what wars are going on down there where the spirit meets the bone.

Now for the hitch in Jane's character,' he said at last, speaking more calmly than from his look I had expected him to speak. 'The reel of silk has run smoothly enough so far; but I always knew there would come a knot and a puzzle: here it is. Now for vexation, and exasperation, and endless trouble!

The Crusades - the most signal and most durable monument of human folly that has yet appeared in any age or nation.