I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
我相信基督教,正如我相信太阳已经升上来了一样:这并不只是因为我看见了它,而是因为通过它,我看见了一切事物。
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
有限的人可以提出连上帝也无法回答的问题吗?我想,这一点也不困难,因为所有无稽之问都是无法回答的。
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
我寻找宗教,并不是因为它能让我快乐。我向来知道,一瓶酒已经能够让我开心。如果你想寻找一个令自己感觉舒服的宗教,那么我肯定不会推荐基督教。
If you look for truth, you may find comfortin the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.
寻找真理,你最终或可以找到安慰;寻找安慰,你既得不到安慰,也得不到真理,只会在开始阶段得到一些泡沫和不实际的思想,和最终彻底的失望。
If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.
如果整个宇宙没有意义,我们就从来不会发现它没有意义。正如,如果这宇宙没有光,那生物也不会有眼睛,我们也察觉不出黑暗,而黑暗本身根本也没有任何意义。
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
如果我们发现自己内心有一个渴望,不是这世间所能满足的,最可能的解释是,我们的存在是为了另一世界。
Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.
人不是宇宙的中心。上帝不是为了人而存在,人也不是为了自己而存在。
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
成为一个基督徒,就是宽恕那不可宽恕的,因为神已经宽恕了你生命里不可宽恕的一切。
The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.
这世界并不是由百分百的基督徒和百分百的非基督徒所组成。这当中有人,许许多多称呼自己是基督徒的人,包括一些神职人员,但却缓慢地不再是基督徒;这当中也有不自认为基督徒的人,却是逐渐地成为基督徒。
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries;avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of yourselfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
去爱,就会受到伤害。爱任何事物,你的心就会有苦恼、会伤痛。如果你想保护你的心不受任何伤害,你必须什么都不爱,甚至连动物也不行,你要用很多的嗜好及享受,把它小心翼翼地包裹起来,避免任何情感上的牵挂;把你的心完全封锁在自我中心的棺木里。然而在那里,安全、黑暗、稳定、真空,心却变了质。它不会收到伤害,但却会变得坚硬不破、麻木不仁、不可救药。
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
基督徒不认为,因为我们是良善的,所以上帝爱我们;而是因为祂爱我们,他使我们成为良善的。
If God is Love, He is, by definition something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.
如果上帝是爱,那么就定义上说,祂远远不只是仁慈的。从所有的记载都可以看到,尽管祂经常训斥我们、谴责我们,但祂从不轻视我们。祂爱人,给予人不可承受的尊重,是最为深沉、最具悲情,同时是无可抗拒的爱。
Courage is not simply one of the virtues,but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
勇气不只是一个德行,它是每一个德行在受严谨考验时刻所呈现的形式。
God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: It is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
上帝在我们的欢愉中对我们低语,通过我们的良心向我们说话,但却在我们的痛苦中大声疾呼:痛苦原来是神的扬声器,为要唤醒充耳不闻的众生。
Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
教育若失去了价值观的层次,不管它多么有用,都只能塑造一个更聪明的妖魔。
Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
在文学和艺术的创作中,谁拘泥于原创性,谁就不可能原创。然而,如果你单纯地尝试说出真理,一点都不在乎它是否被说过多少次,十之八九你正在原创中而不自知。