Quotables

Ongoing list of some favorite quotes:

If I'm wanting to archive the great words of someone else, why not do it in a public place.  We'll tack the following on to the old list of "Quotables" on the right sidebar link:

"Despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.  We do not." - Gandalf (JRR Tolkien)

"A man who will not help or support others unless he can do so without affecting his safety or his property will never help his neighbor.  He will always reckon with the possibility that doing so will bring some disadvantage and damage, danger and loss.  No neighbor can live alongside another without risk to his safety, property, wife, or child."  - Martin Luther

"The whole Church is needed to receive God's whole revelation in all its beauty and richness." - The Lausanne Covenant

"We must not equate salvation with political liberation, yet the message of salvation implies judgment upon alienation, oppression and discrimination.  Salvation is deliverance from evil; implicit in God's desire to save people from evil is his judgment on the evil from which he saves them.  God hates evil and injustice." - The Lausanne Covenant

"[But] he's as God made him," said the marquis.  "He's not as God will make him," returned Malcolm.  - George MacDonald

Life is to be measured by the amount of interest and not the amount of ease it it, for the more ease the more unrest.  - George MacDonald

Sorrow is noble and gracious.  It enlarges the soul until the soul is capable of mourning and rejoicing simultaneously, of feeling the world's pain and hoping for the world's healing at the same time.  - Jerry Sittser

Better to give up my quest for control and live in hope.  - Jerry Sittser

I am in the throes of being born again.  - Ignatius of Antioch

In a world of fugitives, the person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away.  - TS Eliot

The church exists to set up in the world a new sign which is radically dissimilar to the world's own manner and which contradicts it in a way which is full of promise.  - Karl Barth

This life, therefore, is not righteousness but growth in righteousness, not health but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise.  We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it; the process is not yet finished but it is going on; this is not the end but it is the road.  All does not yet gleam in glory but all is being purified.  - Martin Luther

Doubt seems more like forgetfulness than unbelief.  - Philip Yancey

Any redemption that fails to take such evil into account is no redemption at all.  - Diane Langberg

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.  - Martin Luther King Jr.

The sun pours down on the east, on the lovely land that man cannot enjoy.  He knows only the fear of his heart.  - Alan Paton

The good are vulnerable

As any bird in flight...

The good incline to praise,

To have the knack of seeing that

The best is not destroyed

Although forever threatened.

- Brendan Kennelly

Lord, send us forth into the day to rejoice in all things, to trust you in all circumstances, and to proclaim your coming kingdom to all people.  Amen.  - Common Prayer (June 8)

Beware of world changers - they have not yet learned the true meaning of sin.  - Andy Crouch

Joy is the echo of God's life in us.  - Columba of Iona

What is most needed in our time are Christians who are deeply serious about cultivating and creating but who wear that seriousness lightly - who are not desperately trying to change the world but who also wake up every morning eager to create.  The worst thing we could do is follow that familiar advice to "pray as if it all depended on God, and work as if it all depended on you."  Rather, we need to become people who work as if it all depends of God - because it dose, and because that is the best possible news.  - Andy Crouch

No man can give the impression that he himself is clever and that Christ is might to save.  - James Denney

The final secret, I think, is this: that the words "you shall love the Lord your God" become in the end less of a command than a promise.  - Frederick Buechner

Keep our frailty before us, Lord: that we might set our hearts on you.  - Common Prayer (Jan 17)

Lord, this is the day that you have made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it, even as we know it will bring more than we can do.  Amen.  - Common Prayer (Jan 19)

Stop regarding man in whose nostrils is breath, for of what account is he?  - Isaiah 2:22

Hound us Lord with affection and conviction until we renounce all lesser things to follow you.  - Common Prayer

If even our exile be so full, what must our fullness be?  - Robert Farrar Capon

It is the ordinary that groans with the unutterable weight of glory.  - Robert Farrar Capon

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.  - Robert Farrar Capon

Oneness is not unity.  It is what we do in the face of our differences.  - Paul Tripp

Unless we sit in adoration of you, we will forget whom we serve and for what purpose.  - Common Prayer (Jan 24)

Nor should we look at earlier times of spiritual ministry in our lives that we'll never be capable of that again.  You weren't capable of it the first time.  It was God.  And he is still there.  - Timothy Keller

It is a sin to be less than joyful at what God has done in our lives.  - Timothy Keller

Make my words honest, few, wise, and kind.  - Timothy Keller

We are to be characterized by patience and longing.  Hope in God and in his promise means being able to wait patiently, trusting that fallow ground is never dormant.  - Tish Harrison Warren

As we get to know Jesus, we learn to expect what we cannot yet see.  - Bethany Ferguson

We must know, then, what we are, and that it is not of ourselves that we are what we are.  Unless we know this thoroughly, either we shall not glory at all, or our glorying will be vain.  - Bernard of Clairvaux

"Like all great commitments, love operates simultaneously on two different levels:  the level of gritty reality and the level of transcendent magic." - David Brooks

"People with vocations don't ask:  What do I want from life?  They ask: What is life demanding me to do?  What gap is there in my specific circumstances around me that demands my skill set?  It's not found by looking inside you for your passion.  People have studied this.  Eighty percent of you don't have a passion.  It's found by looking outward, by being sensitive to a void and need, and then answering the chance to be of use."  - David Brooks

"We cannot cultivate health by magnifying our anxieties to the point that they obscure the value of the gifts he's given." - Matthew Loftus

"The sign of a good society is the level and number of things acknowledged to be beyond market values - and thus appreciated for their own sake and not for extrinsic, especially financial, rewards." - Os Guinness

"And I, through woods and fields, through fallen days
Am passing to where I belong:
At home, at ease, and well,
In Sabbaths of this place
Almost invisible,
Toward which I go from song to song." - Wendell Berry

"Every day you have less reason not to give yourself away." - Wendell Berry

"[For the cynic,] the vitality of the old is pathetic; the exuberance of the young is immature; the steadiness of the middle-aged is boredom.  And yet, even for the most disillusioned cynic, an aching longing remains for something true, good, or beautiful." - Brennan Manning

"Suppose for a moment that in a flash of insight you discovered that all your motives for ministry were essentially egocentric, or suppose that last night you got drunk and committed adultery, or suppose that you failed to respond to a cry for help and the person committed suicide.  What would you do?  Would guilt, self-condemnation, and self-hatred consume you, or would you jump into the water and swim a hundred yards at breakneck speed toward Jesus?  Haunted by feelings of unworthiness, would you allow the darkness to overcome you or would you let Jesus be who He is - A Savior of boundless compassion and infinite patience, a Lover who keeps no score of our wrongs? - Brennan Manning

"It is a beautiful night out - a good strong moon, stars, a beautiful black sky, and Wichita all lit up under it.  I listened to "Adagio for strings" tonight.  It is a beautiful sound, and...maybe I will someday write something as beautiful as "Adagio," something as beautiful as this night.  And if I had a child, I'd tell him to let these things speak to him as I cannot speak, and to see in them what cannot yet be seen in himself, and know that a day is coming when the night will envy his beauty and when "Adagio" will sound like a theory assignment compared to the sound that he will be - one vibrant, shimmering answer that silences the noise of proud skepticism." - Rich Mullins (1955-1997)

"Doctor, without your wounds, where would your power be?  It is your melancholy that makes your low voice tremble into the hearts of men and women.  The very angels themselves cannot persuade the wretched and blundering children of this earth as can one human being broken on the wheels of living.  In love's service only wounded soldiers can serve." - Thorton Wilder's An Angel That Troubled the Waters

"That anyone at all in the world would set their sad heart and tired hands to the work of wreaking beauty out of chaos is a monument to Grace." - Andrew Peterson

"We actually love ourselves more than we love joy." - G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

"He says he is fleeing from his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive. He can visit Venice be cause to him the Venetians are only Venetians; the people in his own street are men." - G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

"Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it's like to live inside somebody else's skin. It is the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too." - Frederick Buechner (1926-)

On Theology: "Theology is the study of God and his ways. For all we know, dung beetles may study us and our ways and call it humanology. If so, we would probably be more touched and amused than irritated. On hopes that God feels likewise." - Frederick Buechner (1926-)

On Ugliness: "Who knows to what extent their ugliness has led them too to be despised and rejected and to despise and reject themselves? Who knows whether their acquaintance with grief will open their hearts also to the grieving of others or whether it will turn their hearts to stone? But for the sake of the one who bore it before they did, we are to honor them for the sanctity of their burden. For his sake, we are called to see their terrible beauty." - Frederick Buechner (1926-)

On Prayer: "What about when the boy is not healed? When, listened to or not listened to, the prayer goes unanswered? Who knows? Just keep praying, Jesus says. Remember the sleepy friend, the crooked judge. Even if the boy dies, keep on beating the path to God's door, because the one thing you can be sure of is that down the path you beat with even your most half-cocked and halting prayer the God you call upon will finally come, and even if he does not bring you the answer you want, he will bring you himself. And maybe at the secret heart of all our prayers that is what we are really praying for." - Frederick Buechner (1926-)

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going.

I do not see the road ahead of me.

I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.

I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

-Thomas Merton (1915-1968)

"Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than it is useful." - Robert Capon (1925-)

"Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; world's wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, patch, matchwood,
immortal diamond
Is immortal diamond."
-Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)

"Eternal light shine on our hearts
Eternal goodness deliver us from evil
Eternal power be our support
Eternal wisdom scatter the darkness of our ignorance.

Eternal pity have mercy on us
That with all our heart and mind
and soul and strength we may seek thy face
and be brought by thine infinite mercy
to thy holy presence."
-Alcuin of York (c.735-804)

"It’s when you no longer know where your milk comes from, let alone where you got your opinions, that you have become over-urbanized." - David Warren

"This is the end - but for me, the beginning - of life." Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) on the day of his execution by the Nazi regime

"A moral problem cannot be solved with a technical solution." - John Patrick (1940-)

"The world is looking for those who have scars where they have wounds." - Steve Saint (1951-)

"A silver coin rings down that well,
you could never spend too much.
A diamond echoes deeper still,
and you'll always have what you gave to love."
- David Wilcox (1958-)

"I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast. And when I run, I feel His pleasure." - Eric Liddell (1902-1945) in Chariots of Fire (1981)

"I will be...kind to the unkind, for such is how God has treated me." - Max Lucado (1955-)

"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... 'Believe this, not because it's true, but for some other reason.' That's the game." - CS Lewis (1898-1963) from The Screwtape Letters

"So saying, her rash hand in evil hour
Forth-reaching to the Fruit, she plucked, she eat.
Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,
Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe
That all was lost." - John Milton (1608-1674) Paradise Lost

"When we were little, we gave ourselves over to faith. Now we are big, and too heavy to rise above our own understanding." - Rich Mullins (1955-1997)

"Innocence...we never got to say goodbye. But the glory of redemption is the wisdom that we find has taken its place." - Andrew Osenga (1979-)

Frodo: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.
Gandalf: So do all who live to see such times; but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. -Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

Pippin: I didn't think it would end this way.
Gandalf: End? No, the journey doesn't end here. Death is just another path. One that we all must take. The grey rain-curtain of this world rolls back, and all turns to silver glass... then you see it!
Pippin: What? Gandalf? See what?
Gandalf: White shores... and beyond. A far green country, under a swift sunrise.
Pippin: Well, that isn't so bad.
Gandalf: No. No, it isn't. -Return of the King (1955)

"The art of medicine consists in amusing the patient while nature effects a cure." - Voltaire (1694-1778)

"A humble knowledge of thyself is a surer way to God than a deep search after learning" - Thomas a Kempis (c1380-1471)

"Humanity is fickle. They may dress for a morning coronation and never feel the need to change clothes for an execution in the afternoon. So Triumphal Sundays and Good Fridays always fit comfortably into the same April week." - Calvin Miller

"There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky; there is one spectacle grander than the sky, that is the interior of the soul." - Victor Hugo (1802-1885)

"Intelligence and capability are not enough. There must be the joy of doing something beautiful." - Dr. G. Venkataswamy (1918-)

"Love is an earthquake that relocates the center of the universe." - Mike Mason

"There is always realistic hope in the Lord Jesus Christ." - April Perry

"Hate was just a failure of imagination." - Graham Greene (1904-1991)

"He who breaks a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom." - JRR Tolkien (1892-1973)

"Some seek knowledge for
The sake of knowledge:
That is curiosity;
Others seek knowledge so that
They themselves may be known:
That is vanity;
But there are still others
Who seek knowledge in
Order to serve and edify others;
And that is love."
-Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)

"It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspections proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit--immortal horrors or everlasting splendours." - CS Lewis (1898-1963) from "The Weight of Glory"

"'You come of the Lord Adam and the Lady Eve,' said Aslan. 'And that is both honour enough to erect the head of the poorest beggar, and shame enough to bow the shoulders of the greatest emperor in earth.'" - CS Lewis (1898-1963) from "Prince Caspian"

"Everyone must give an account to God for every good thing he saw in life and did not enjoy." - Talmud
"He is no fool who loses that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose." - Jim Elliot (1927-1956)

"Vocation is where your deep gladness meets the world's deep need." - Frederick Buechner (1926-)

"If I covet any place on earth but the dust at the foot of the Cross, then I know nothing of Calvary love." - Amy Carmichael (1867-1951)

"Whoever takes up medicine should seriously consider the following points: firstly, that he must one day render to the Supreme Judge an account of the lives of those sick men who have been entrusted to his care. Secondly, that such skill and science as, by the blessing of Almighty God, he has attained, are to be specially directed toward the honour of his Maker, and the welfare of his fellow-creatures; since it is a base thing for the great gifts of Heaven to become the servants of avarice and ambition. Thirdly, he must remember that it is no mean or ignoble animal that he deals with. We may ascertain the worth of the human race, since for its sake God’s Only-begotten Son became man, and thereby ennobled the nature that he took upon him. Lastly, he must remember that he himself hath no exemption from the common lot, but that he is bound by the same laws of mortality, and liable to the same ailments and afflictions with his fellows. For these and like reasons let him strive to render aid to the distressed with the greater care, with the kindlier spirit, and with the stronger fellow-feeling." - Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689)