When about to commit a base deed, respect thyself, though there is no witness.

When the author admits to Christians that he was not a Christian himself, he says their dialogue became 'distant and rehearsed, like a pitch for Ginsu knives.

People will continue to doubt you until they witness first hand the results of what you have mastered.

Life writes the poetry, but it will always call for witnesses and scribes alike to tattoo its echoes upon the ghosts of trees.

Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt...You're a better witness for what's beautiful.

Suddenly summoned to witness something great and horrendous, we keep fighting not to reduce it to our own smallness.

As anyone who has experienced it will know, war is many contradictory things. There is brutality and heroism, comedy and tragedy, friendship, hate, love and boredom. War is absurd yet fundamental, despicable yet beguiling, unfair yet with its own strange logic. Rarely are people 'back home' exposed to these contradictions — society tends only to highlight those qualities it needs, to construct its own particular narrative.

I am one of his witnesses, and in a coming day I shall feel the nail marks in his hands and in his feet and shall wet his feet with my tears. But I shall not know any better than I know now that he is God’s Almighty Son, that he is our Savior and Redeemer, and that salvation comes in and through his atoning blood and in no other way.

Trauma is not what happens to us, but what we hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.

We're Christians. We have to care what people think. The appearance of wrongdoing, remember? I'm not going to move in with you had have people think we're living in sin. What sort of witness would that be?