Beware of overconcern for money, or position, or glory. Someday you will meet a man who cares for none of these things. Then you will know how poor you are. The new year is here. Neil deGrass Tyson may be right and it “is a cosmically arbitrary event, carrying no Astronomical significance at all,” but…
Category: Quotes
God’s Love Causes Goodness
Another great quote from C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain: But God’s love, far from being caused by the goodness in an object, causes all the goodness an object has, loving it first into existence and then into real, though derivative, loveability. God is Goodness. He can give good, but cannot need or get it.
“I have the right to doubt, am I using it?”
I listen to old-time radio all night, specifically 20th Century Radio. This morning, after my wife’s alarm unintentionally went off (doh!) and my youngest daughter (not considering it is two hours earlier here, doh!) texted, “Happy Thanksgiving,” Night Beat’s “Target for a Day” episode was playing. The main character, reporter Randy Stone, had been falsely accused by…
“We must play.”
The right way to be merry… We must play. But our merriment must be that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption.1 — C.S. Lewis 1Lewis, C. S. (2001). The weight of glory: And other…
Heaven
Why does God not make certain things clearer? Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. C.S. Lewis from Weight of Glory (page 33 in my HarperOne edition).
Choose Your Train (You Must)
Recently I heard the track “Dark Passenger” by the group Fozzy. It starts off with: Jesus is my co-pilot Or that’s just what they say But it’s not the Savior Who guides me every day Although the lyrics are a bit ambiguous, and it almost sounds like the anti-hero of the song wants to repent,…
God Gives Us What We Want
I’ve heard this C.S. Lewis quote before…but was glad to run into it in page 72 of my The Great Divorce: There are two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done,’ and those to whom God says, in the end, ‘Thy will be done.’ All that are…
Did C.S. Lewis Really Say That?!
My present “below 10,000 feet” book is The Great Divorce by C.S. Lewis. Without spoiling the story, it is a fictional way of discussing all the different excuses people have for rejecting the truth. In one of the interesting dialogues, the saved friend is trying to convince a to-smart-for-his-own-britches former (before he died) intellectual minister….
The Blood of Martyrs Is the Seed of the Church?
If you are a Christian, there is a decent chance you've heard Tertullian1 quoted as saying, "The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church." I could not find that exact quote in my Logos library, but perhaps this is its basis: Nor does your cruelty, however exquisite, avail you; it is rather a…
“It has every available quality except that of being useful.”
Although some might argue that this means I am not a Christian (in that I do not hold all the "common doctrines of Christianity"), I think C.S. Lewis (from Mere Christianity) has the definition of "Christian" right: Far deeper objections may be felt—and have been expressed—against my use of the word Christian to mean one…
“Too often we underestimate…”
Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around. –Leo Buscaglia, Born for Love (as quoted by Barbara Oakley in Cold-Blooded Kindness).