quotes by Theologian Quotes

“Surely what a man does when he is taken off guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats; it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make me ill tempered; it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am.”

“Your wisdom should be without pride.”

“The task must be made difficult, for only the difficult inspires the noble-hearted.”

“The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.”

“The most venerable, clearly understood, enlightened, and reliable constant in the world is not only that we want to be happy, but that we want only to be so. Our very nature requires it of us.”

“...the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a household laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him..." - C.S. Lewis: Weight of Glory”

“It is more blessed to give than to receive, but then it is also more blessed to be able to do without than to have to have.”

“If they embark on this course the difference between the old and the new education will be an important one. Where the old initiated, the new merely 'conditions'. The old dealt with its pupils as grown birds deal with young birds when they teach them to fly; the new deals with them more as the poultry-keeper deals with young birds- making them thus or thus for purposes of which the birds know nothing. In a word, the old was a kind of propagation-men transmitting manhood to men; the new is merely propaganda.”

“To the man who is truly ethical all life is sacred, including that which from the human point of view seems lower in the scale. He makes distinctions only as each case comes before him, and under the pressure of necessity, as, for example, when it falls to him to decide which of two lives he must sacrifice in order to preserve the other. But all through this series of decisions he is conscious of acting on subjective grounds and arbitrarily, and knows that he bears the responsibility for the life which is sacrificed.”

“The mouse is a fair treat but this one would talk the hind legs off a donkey.”

“The only way out of today's misery is for people to become worthy of each other's trust.”

“For in grief nothing 'stays put.' One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round.Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”

“No one can say 'He jests at scars who never felt a wound' for I have never for one moment been in a state of mind to which even the imagination of serious pain was less than intolerable. If any man is safe from the danger of under-estimating this adversary, I am that man.”

“When the king asked him what he meant by infesting the sea, the pirate defiantly replied:The same as you do when you infest the whole world;but because I do it with a little ship I am called a robber,and because you do it with a great fleet, you are an emperor.”

“Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”

“How high a price we pay for the burden of habit! I am fitted for life here where I do not want to be, I want to live there but am unfit for it, and on both counts I am miserable.”

“Where I come from, they don't think much of men who are bossed about by their wives.”

“Never cease loving a person, and never give up hope for him, for even the prodigal son who had fallen most low, could still be saved; the bitterest enemy and also he who was your friend could again be your friend; love that has grown cold can kindle.”

“Ye cannot know eternal reality by a definition. Time itself, and all the acts and events that fill time are the definition, and it must be lived.”

“Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country: but none will rise again until it has been buried.”

“Thought is the strongest thing we have. Work done by true and profound thought - that is a real force.”

“By and by never comes.”

“Do something wonderful, people may imitate it.”

“It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.”

“Because I have confidence in the power of truth, and of the spirit, I have confidence in the future of mankind.”

“It is intelligent to ask two questions: (1) Is it possible? (2) Can I do it?. But it is unintelligent to ask these questions: (1) Is it real? (2) Has my neighbor done it?”

“Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. One fails forward toward success.”

“All people are endowed with the faculty of compassion, and for this reason can develop the humanitarian spirit.”

“Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. (And) There is no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Righ and Wrong are.”

“Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair.”

“When you are not feeling particularly friendly but know you ought to be, the best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were.”

“I begin to suspect that the world is divided not only into the happy and the unhappy, but into those who like happiness and those who, odd as it seems, really don't.”

“Reverence for life, veneratio vitæ, is the most direct and at the same time the profoundest achievement of my will-to-live.”

“Man has become a superman ... because he not only disposes oinnate, physical forces, but because he is in command ... olatent forces in nature and because he can put them to his service.... But the essential fact we must surely all feel in our hearts ... is that we are becoming inhuman in proportion as we become supermen.”

“We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals...The child as reader is neither to be patronized nor idolized: we talk to him as man to man.”

“What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?”

“Job endured everything - until his friends came to comfort him, then he grew impatient.”

“Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it. The hypothesis has certain facts to support it. As far as peace (which is one ingredient in our idea of civilization)is concerned, I think many would now agree that a foreign policy dominated by desire for peace is one of the many roads that lead to war.”

“The only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. Our charities should pinch and hamper us. If we live at the same level of affluence as other people who have our level of income, we are probably giving away too little.”

“It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.”

“That's my private ant. You're liable to break its legs.”

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.”

“Thou must be emptied of that wherewith thou art full, that thou mayest be filled with that whereof thou art empty.”

“Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.”

“My life is my argument.”

“Those who cannot conceive of Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend.”

“The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary color in the spectrum.”

“And in truth (as I now see) I had the wish to put off my journey as long as I could. Not for any peril or labour it might cost; but because I could see nothing in the whole world for me to do once it was accomplished. AS long as this act lay before me, there was, as it were, some barrier between me and the dead desert which the rest of my life must be.”

“To be in love involves the most irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness.”

“Much is expected from those to whom much is given.”