It is not by change of place that we can come nearer to Him who is in every place, but by the cultivation of pure desires and virtuous habits. - Augustine of Hippo

God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.

it is a higher glory... to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword, and to procure or maintain peace by peace, not by war.

Even then [at the time of Peter's speech in Acts 2] it was the last days; how much more so now, when there must still be as much time till the end of the world as has passed since the ascension of the Lord! We do not know the end of the world, because it is not for us to know the times or the seasons that the Father has set in his power; but we know that, like the apostles, we live in the last times, in the last days, in the last hour. Those who lived after the apostles and before us were more in what we call the last times, and we ourselves are in them even more than they; those who will come after us will be so much more, till one gets to those who will be, if one may say so, the last of the last, and finally till that day, the very last, of which the Lord means to speak when he said, "And I will raise him up on the last day". How far are we from that day? That is an impenetrable secret.