Poignant Quotations

[Jehu_ben_Nimshi]

In the past, I've attempted to underline or keep a notebook by my side to notate any quotes from a particular work, but I get bogged down to easily.  It simply isn't reading.  You would have no idea how many books I own that have something underlined every couple of pages for the first forty or fifty pages of the book, and then nothing after that.  For me, it is just too much of a chore.

Alas, I am often impressed by certain qoutes or thoughts while I read, and I hereby recommend a quotation from your personal reading thread.  Either this thread or another.  I will start it off.

"To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery.  It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist."  --Emmanuel, Cardinal Suhard  

 

[Josh]

Art's necessary illusions serve to expose the illusory character of the experienced world.... Artists of necessity refer to the given world, yet to be art their work must imply (refer to) a whole new world of unrealized possibility.

--James William McClendon, Witness: Systematic Theology

[Vlad!]

A most excellent idea, Jehu_ben_Nimshi. Since I am, sadly, not reading anything more interesting than a textbook on Networking, I shall go to my own list of profound quotes from books.

"Yet men have come to such a pass that they frequently starve, not for want of necessaries, but for want of luxuries."

"Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them."

Both from Walden by Henry David Thoreau.

[Josh]

"[God]'s Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk about God."

--CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

[DvChWi]

"[God]'s Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense.... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk about God."

--CS Lewis, The Problem of Pain

Very nice.  This, incidently, answers the question in Vlad's sig quite nicely.

[bethany]

"Norman Douty writes: 'If I am to be like Him, then God in His grace
must do it, and the sooner I come to recognize it the sooner I will be
delivered from another form of bondage. Throw down every endeavor and
say, I cannot do it, the more I try the farther I get from His
likeness. What shall I do? Ah, the Holy Spirit says, You cannot do it;
just withdraw; come out of it. You have been in the arena, you have
been endeavoring, you are a failure, come out and sit down, and as you
sit there behold Him, look at Him. Don't try to be like Him, just look
at Him. Just be occupied with Him. Forget about trying to be like Him.
Instead of letting that fill your mind and heart, let Him fill it.
Just behold Him, look upon Him through the Word. Come to the Word for
one purpose and that is to meet the Lord. Not to get your mind crammed
full of things about the sacred Word, but come to it to meet the Lord.
Make it to be a medium, not of Biblical scholarship, but of fellowship
with Christ. Behold the Lord.'"

(taken from Principles of Spiritual Growth, by Miles J. Stanford, but as indicated, the quote is entirely from Norman Douty in some other work)

[Vlad!]

"The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime."
-Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

[enemy anemone]

He who works with his hands is a laborer, he who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman, he who works with his hands, his head and his heart is an artist.
--Francis of Assisi

The cure for boredom is curiosity.
There is no cure for curiosity.
-- Ellen Parr

I came across both quotes from the book At Knits End: Meditations for Women Who Knit Too Much.

[Vlad!]

"When I first came into my money, at eighteen, when people said Guilt I said Bosh. They cried Conscience. I cried Crapulous Nonsense! But in those days the rain barrel was empty. A lot of strange rain has fallen since and gathered in me, and to my cold surprise I find me to the brim with old sin and know there is conscience and guilt."

-Ray Bradbury, "The Haunting of the New"

[Vlad!]

"'You are a clever man, friend John; you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?"
-Dracula, Bram Stoker

[phaith]

"It wasn't animals who invented machines, it was humans. So what is it about our essential humanity that we are expressing with our inventions? What is it that makes us..us? I thought of how odd it is for billions of people to be alive, yet not one of them is not really quite sure of what makes people...people. The only activities I could think of that humans do that have no other animal equivalent were, smoking, body-building, and writing. That's not much, considering how special we seem to think we are." - Douglas Coupland -

 

[Blindman]

From CS Lewis' The Great Divorce:

"That is what mortals misunderstand.  They say of some temporal suffering, 'No future bliss can make up for it,' not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.  And of some sinful pleasure they say 'Let me but have this and I"ll take the consequences': little dreaming how damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of the sin.  Both processes begin even before death.  The good man's past begins to change so that his forgiven sins and remembered sorrows take on the quality of Heaven: the bad man's past already conforms to his badness and is filled only with dreariness.  And that is why, at the end of all things, when the sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the Blessed will say, 'We have never lived anywhere except in Heaven,' and the Lost, 'We were always in Hell.'  And both will speak truly."

[Josh]

"And indeed, critics, like creative writers, are always in one sense writing about themselves."

--Foster Hirsch, Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen

[Tom]

here are two of my favorite C. S. Lewis quotes, but there are lots more of his that i like too.

in fact, i just finished recording a song inspired by this particular quote:

"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."

and another good one:

"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."
 

[Vlad!]

There were a number of quotes that struck me from Blue Like Jazz, but here are a few:

"The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up. By toeing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not." [p. 214]

"The power of Christian spirituality has always rested in repentance, so that's what I did. I repented. I told God I was sorry. I replaced economic metaphor [of love] in my mind with something different, a free gift metaphor or a magnet metaphor. That is, instead of withholding love to change sombody, I poured it on, lavishly. I hoped that live would work like a magnet, pulling people from the mire and toward healing. I knew this was the way God loved me. God had never withheld love to teach me a lesson...Here is something very simple about relationships that Spencer helped me discover: nobody will listen to you unless they sense that you like them." [p 221]

[Rachel]

From The Count of Monte Cristo:

"For the happy man prayer is only a jumble of words, until the day when sorrow comes to explain to him the sublime language by mean of which he speaks to God."

"Joy sometimes has a strange effect. It can oppress almost as much as sorrow"
 

[Vlad!]

This is not, admittedly, particularly poignant. But I was amused by it, and for some people it is indeed quite apt. It hails from Captain Blood Returns, by Rafael Sabatini:

"A man of middle height, big of head and paunch and of less than mediocre intelligence, Hon Jayne was one of those gentlemen who best served Spain by being absent from her, and this no doubt had been considered in appointing him Governer of Porto Rico."

[enemy anemone]

I came across this quote the other day:
The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference.
Elie Wiesel

[Vlad!]

That's a good quote. I think I had the first line of it in my sig a while back.

[Silent Wonder]

"No man for any considerable period can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true." -- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter

Also from The Great Divorce:

"Heaven is reality itself.  All that is fully real is Heavenly.  For all that can be shaken will be shaken and only the unshakeable remains."

"There have been men before now who got so interested in proving the existence of God that they came to care nothing for God Himself. . . as if the good Lord had nothing to do but exist!  There have been some who were so occupied in spreading Christianity that they never gave a thought to Christ. [. . .] It is the subtlest of all snares."

"Here is joy that cannot be shaken.  Our light can swallow up your darkness: but your darkness cannot now infect our light. [. . .] Can you really have thought that love and joy would always be at the mercy of frowns and sighs?  Did you not know they were stronger than their opposites?"

[Vlad!]

This is from Catch-22:
"What the hell are you getting so upset about?" he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. "I thought you didn't believe in God."
"I don't," she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be."

[Silent Wonder]

From The Summer of the Great-Grandmother by Madeleine L'Engle:

"I must never lose sight of those other deaths which precede the final, physical death, the deaths over which we have some freedom: the deaths of self-will, self-indulgence, self-deception, all those self-devices which, instead of making us more fully alive, make us less."

[Vlad!]

From Memoirs of a Geisha:

* Grief is a most peculiar thing; we're so helpless in the face of it. It's like a window that will simply open of its own accord. The room grows cold, and we can do nothing but shiver. But it opens a little less each time, and a little less; and one day we wonder what has become of it.

* I don't think any of us can speak frankly about pain until we are no longer enduring it.

[Vlad!]

... But as records of courts and justice are admissible, it can easily be proved that powerful and malevolent magicians once existed and were a scourge to mankind. The evidence (including confession) upon which certain women were convicted of witchcraft and executed was without a flaw; it is still unimpeachable. The judges' decisions based on it were sound in logic and in law. Nothing in any existing court was ever more thoroughly proved than the charges of witchcraft and sorcery for which so many suffered death. If there were no witches, human testimony and human reason are alike destitute of value.
-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

(No, I am not actually reading The Devil's Dictionary, but the quote caught my fancy.)