Quotes, Poems and Excerpts

aleksandr solzhenitsyn

… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles?  If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now.  Do not pursue what is illusionary - property and position:  All that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night.  Live with a steady superiority over life - don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: The bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides.  If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy?  And why?  Our envy of others devours us most of all.  Rub your eyes and purify your heart - and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know:  It may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory. 

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

-There is meaning in every journey that is unknown to the traveler.

-In ordinary life we hardly realize that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is only with gratitude that life becomes rich.

-Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.

-It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.

Blaise Pascal

-The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

-Nothing fortifies skepticism more than the fact that there are those who are not skeptics;  if all were so, they would be wrong.

-Our soul is cast into a body, where it finds number, time, dimension.  Thereupon it reasons, and calls this nature necessity, and can believe nothing else.

-The supreme function of reason is to show man that some things are beyond reason.
 

baltasar gracian

-The envious die not once, but as oft as the envied win applause.

-True friendship multiplies the good in life and divides its evils. Strive to have friends, for life without friends is like life on a desert island..to find one real friend in a lifetime is good fortune; to keep him is a blessing.

-Fortunate people often have very favorable beginnings and very tragic endings. What matters isn't being applauded when you arrive - for that is common - but being missed when you leave.

francis schaeffer

-The beginning of men's rebellion against God was, and is, the lack of a thankful heart.

-Christian art is the expression of the whole life of the whole person as a Christian.  What a Christian portrays in his art is the totality of life.  Art is not to be solely a vehicle for some sort of self-conscious evangelism.

-Christianity is realistic because it says that if there is no truth, there is also no hope; and there can be no truth if there is no adequate base. It is prepared to face the consequences of being proved false and say with Paul: If you find the body of Christ, the discussion is finished, let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die. It leaves absolutely no room for a romantic answer.

soren kierkegaard

-People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.

-There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.

-In order to help another effectively, I must understand what he understands. If I do not know that, my greater understanding will be of no help to him... instruction begins when you put yourself in his place so that you may understand what he understands and in the way he understands it.

-People settle for a level of despair they can tolerate and call it happiness.

j.r.r. tolkien

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

-No half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.

-Such is oft the course of deeds that move the wheels of the world: small hands do them because they must, while the eyes of the great are elsewhere.

john bunyan

-A man there was, though some did count him mad, the more he cast away the more he had.

-You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.

-If my life is fruitless, it does not matter who praises me, and if my life is fruitful, it does not matter who criticizes me.

Dag hammarskjöld

-God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.

-Your cravings as a human animal do not become a prayer just because it is God whom you ask to attend to them.

-To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place. In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.

rené descartes

-If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things. 

-Whenever anyone has offended me, I try to raise my soul so high that the offense cannot reach it.

-In order to improve the mind, we ought less to learn, than to contemplate.

-The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.
 

max planck

-Religion and natural science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism and dogmatism, against disbelief and against superstition, and the rallying cry in this crusade has always been, and will always be, 'On to God.'

-There can never be any real opposition between religion and science; for the one is the complement of the other. Every serious and reflective person realizes, I think, that the religious element in his nature must be recognized and cultivated if all the powers of the human soul are to act together in perfect balance and harmony. And indeed it was not by accident that the greatest thinkers of all ages were deeply religious souls.

-A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.

-Anybody who has been seriously engaged in scientific work of any kind realizes that over the entrance to the gates of the temple of science are written the words: 'Ye must have faith.'
 

dorothy L. sayers

-It is not the business of the church to adapt Christ to men, but men to Christ.

-It seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy.  On the contrary, it is fiercely and even harshly realistic, insisting that there are certain eternal achievements that make even happiness look like trash.

-It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe.

wendell berry

When despair for the world grows in me, and I wake in the night at the least sound, in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.  I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.  I come into the presence of still water.  And I feel above me the day, blind stars waiting with their light.    For a time, I rest in the grace of the world, and I am free.
  

ABRAHAM KUYPER

...The holy art of “giving for Jesus’ sake” ought to be much more strongly developed among us Christians.  Never forget that all state relief for the poor is a blot on the honor of your savior.  The fact that the government needs a safety net to catch those who would slip between the cracks of our economic system is evidence that I have failed to do God’s work.  The government cannot take the place of Christian charity.  A loving embrace isn’t given with food stamps.  The care of a community isn’t provided with government housing.  The face of our Creator can’t be seen on a welfare voucher. What the poor need is not another government program; what they need is for Christians like me to honor our savior.

-Art cannot be excused from following God’s law, and art disgraces itself by seeking that freedom. Anything that cannot be put into an image or onto a canvas without demanding the sacrifice of modesty or injuring shame must simply be eschewed. Art is not autonomous. Art is one of the more refined human life expressions, and all these life expressions are organically related and stand continuously under God’s ordinance.

mark twain

-I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.

-Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered - either by themselves or by others.

-A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.

-Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it.
 

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night, 
Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right, 
Because their words had forked no lightning they 
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright 
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, 
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, 
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight 
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height, 
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray. 
Do not go gentle into that good night. 
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.