William Nicholson Quotes

When life is good and we have no problems, we can almost let ourselves believe we have no need for God. But in my experience, sometimes the richest blessings come through pain and hard things.

Suffering will get you great footage. I don't know about closer to God. Although there have been times when I've suffered to the point where I think I might be about to meet him.

Isn't it funny that God takes you and puts you through the unendurable, and then, at the moment you have just begun to understand it and have some wisdom, it ends?

Life is very difficult. One of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere, I would say, is that life is essentially suffering.

Pain is God's midwife, that helps some virtue into existence.

Affliction of itself does not sanctify any body, but the reverse. I believe in sanctified afflictions, but not in sanctifying afflictions.

God always seems bigger to those who need him most. And suffering is the tool he uses to help us need him more.

There are many trials in life which do not seem to come from unwisdom or folly; they are silver arrows shot from the bow of God, and fixed inextricably in the quivering heart - they are meant to be borne - they were not meant, like snow or water, to melt as soon as they strike; but the moment an ill can be patiently borne it is disarmed of its poison, though not of its pain.

Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

All life is a struggle in the dark.

Misery is the River of the World

God only allows pain if He’s allowing something new to be born.

Dear Child of God, I am sorry to say that suffering is not optional.

in prosperity prayers seem but a mere medley of words, until misfortune comes and the unhappy sufferer first understands the meaning of the sublime language in which he invokes the pity of heaven!

It is doubtful whether God can bless a man greatly until He has hurt him deeply.

When afflictions arrest us, we shall murmur and grumble and struggle until we see that it is God that strikes.

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world....No doubt pain as God's megaphone is a terrible instrument; it may lead to final and unrepented rebellion. But it gives the only opportunity the bad man can have for amendment. it removes the veil; it plants the flag of truth within the fortress of the rebel soul.

True, God hates Alzheimer's, spinal cord injury, mental illness, autism, and the rest (these conditions are all symptoms of the Fall). Yet he permits these things to accomplish something far more precious in our lives: patience, endurance, compassion for others who hurt, and refined faith and trust in God, to name a few.

It is the lot of man to suffer.

Life packed a clever one-two punch: cruelty and absurdity.

Blows are what awaken us & help to break the dream. They show us the insufficiency of this world & make us long to escape, to have freedom.

Affliction is a treasure, and scarce any man hath enough of it. No man hath affliction enough that is not matured and ripened by it and made fit for God.

Dealing with adversity is like preparing for surgery. By putting our faith in what the doctor has said, we believe we will be better off if we have the surgery. But that does not make it any less painful. By submitting to the hand of a surgeon, we are saying that our ultimate goal is health, even at the cost of pain. Adversity is the same way. It is a means to an end. It is God's tool for the advancement of our spiritual lives.

It is not God's way that great blessings should descend without the sacrifice first of great sufferings. If the truth is to be spread to any wide extent among the people, how can we dream, how can we hope, that trial and trouble shall not accompany its going forth.