Quotes from Geoffrey Wood

Where faith costs nothing, faith loses respect, even to those who possess it.

But as I say, if you look to the state of their souls you'll find the situation nowhere near as grave as polls suggest. There's more to being a servant of The Adversary than signing up.

Truth, with a capital T, was swapped for Fact with a capital F, then both lower-cased —facts the new trues.

Life, liberty and the pursuit of gratitude, now that would've worked. They would have been readily led to contentment, which would've then better lead them on to happiness.

They forget that for a Creator to create, He must be greater than His creation, thus He must be by definition not less than emotional.

They really do occupy a scrumptious little dark corner of my heart!

Now they feel not only known and still loved, but also loved because they are known.

Selling a new lie is easy, but not so with un-teaching an old truth.

The eye is to light as the soul is to God.

No earthly act escapes its eternal echoes, echoes more substantial than the acts themselves.

Indeed if they ever once saw the endless supply of eternal opportunities The Adversary offers them every temporal moment of day after day of their fuddled little lives, they would stagger at the sheer industry and prodigality of His efforts. Conversely, if they ever gained a glimpse of how their ordinary actions actually effect and shape things not only under time but without, the very vast weight of that would almost certainly end in their becoming humble.

A tiny adjustment, but a tasty one. Poof! And somewhere in the back of their minds the godlike thought glimmers.

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

If we blind them to The Adversary —decrease their desire for The Desire— while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing "freedom of choice," then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

Chant to him: "An individual thinks for himself." Then roll that around in his head till it means: "If I didn't think of it, it has no bearing on my life.

Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.

Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.

This is why we apply the LCD Principle or Lowest Common Democracy. In short, this is social interaction based not on the best possible good, but on the least possible offense. Without saying so, the parties involved have entered into the following arrangement: What is the least we can all agree on and still get along? Of course, you can see this means no one is pleased.

For example, your man might think: I don't steal. Maybe on my taxes, everyone does that, but not in the way I heard so and so stole from his company. See? Those men for whose opinion he cares approve of embezzlement in one area, not the other. He uses them to maintain a claim on goodness while at the same time stealing.

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

If they ever envision Goodness as a thing that exists outside them, some real thing they've been called to participate in by their actions, well then, we're headed right back toward The Virtues.

We've spent centuries moving them away from that word virtue and especially The Virtues and that's precisely how we did it —by making it lower case.

Faith is where they learn about their God; but Prayer is where they explore Him.