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- (God) will not be used as a convenience. Men or nations who think they can revive the Faith in order to make a good society might just as well think they can use the stairs of heaven as a shortcut to the nearest chemist’s shop.
- [To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.
- A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
- Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives.
- Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
- An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason.
- Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
- Christianity is a world that is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there a rumor going around the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life
- Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
- Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
- Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone you will presently come to love him
- Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.
- Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.
- 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 twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
- Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
- Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
- Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.
- Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.
- Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: What! You too? I thought I was the only one.
- Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
- God has not been trying an experiment on my faith or love in order to find out their quality. He knew it already. It was I who didn’t. In this trial He makes us occupy the dock, the witness box, and the bench all at once. He always knew that my temple was a house of cards. His only way of making me realize the fact was to knock it down.
- Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.
- 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.
- I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
- 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.
- If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
- If we discover a desire within us that nothing in this world can satisfy, also we should begin to wonder if perhaps we were created for another world.
- If you look for truth, you may find comfort in 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.
- In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.
- It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
- It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.
- Let's pray that the human race never escapes from Earth to spread its iniquity elsewhere.
- Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
- Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained
- Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
- No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.
- Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
- Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
- Reason is the natural order of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning.
- Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
- Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ.
- Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
- The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
- The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.
- The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are excellent campaigning weather for the devil.
- The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.
- The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.
- The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
- The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts.
- The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
- The very man who has argued you down, will sometimes be found, years later, to have been influenced by what you said
- There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way."
- This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
- To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
- To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly 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 your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless--it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable
- We all want progress, but if you're on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road; in that case, the man who turns back soonest is the most progressive.
- We are all fallen creatures and all very hard to live with
- We are what we believe we are.
- What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
- What you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing; it also depends on what kind of a person you are
- When we lose one blessing, another is often most unexpectedly given in its place
- You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream.
- You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me.
- You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
may 13 2012 ∞
may 13 2012 +
may 13 2012 +