"Mere pleasure is at best but fleeting; happiness is abiding, for in the recollection thereof is renewed."
— James E. Talmage

"Without a revolution of the inner life, however slow, all our big designs are worthless. The work we have to do is with ourselves if we're ever going to be at peace with each other...the good that flows from it will shape our societies in an unprogrammed, unforeseen way, under the control of no single group of people or set of ideas."
— Ian McEwan

"The evil I'm talking about lives in us all. It takes hold in an individual, in private lives, within a family, adn then it's children who suffer most. And then, when teh conditions are right, in different countries, at different times, a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts, and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within himself. Then it sinks back and waits. It's something in our hearts."
— Ian McEwan

"One who really prays that this kingdom will come...[will make the effort to] keep himself in harmony with the order of the kingdom, to subject the flesh to the spirit, selfishness to altruism, and to learn to love the things that God loves. To make the will of God supreme on earth as it is in heaven is to be allied with God in the affairs of life."
— James E. Talmage

"Man cannot measure the bounds nor fathom the depths of divine forgiveness..."
— James E. Talmage

"It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"...a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader's. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it."
— Ian McEwan (Atonement)

"No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins."
— Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead)

"This is how humans are: We question all our beliefs, except for the ones that we really believe in, and those we never think to question."
- Andrew Wiggin"
— Orson Scott Card (Speaker for the Dead)

"Happiness is not a life without pain, but rather a life in which the pain is traded for a worthy price."
— Orson Scott Card (Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus)

"Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find."
— Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle)

"When the shooting starts would you rather be armed or legal?"
— Cormac McCarthy (The Road)

"It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"Well, I guess in all honesty I would have to say that I never knew nor did I ever hear of anybody that money didnt change."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"I think if you were Satan and you were settin around tryin to think up somethin that would just bring the human race to its knees what you would probably come up with is narcotics."
— Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men)

"If money is a science, then it is a dark science...it has gone on developing...by its own rules"
— Neal Stephenson (Quicksilver)

"We should strive to welcome change and challenges, because they are what help us grow. With out them we grow weak like the Eloi in comfort and security. We need to constantly be challenging ourselves in order to strengthen our character and increase our intelligence. "
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

""Protection? Who are we protecting them from?"
"Themselves.""
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"People shouldn't be afraid of their government. Governments should be afraid of their people."
— Alan Moore (V for Vendetta)

"All we ever see of stars are their old photographs."
— Alan Moore

"The superman exists and he's American."
— Alan Moore (Watchmen)

"People can't live with change if there's not a changeless core inside them."
— Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People)

"[We want] not so much a Father but a grandfather in heaven, [a God who said of anything we happened to like doing], 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?'"
— C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)

"Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility."
— C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)

"Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the Enemy’s (God’s) ground…He [God] made the pleasure: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy [God] has produced, at at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He [God] has forbidden. "
— C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)

"Above all, do not attempt to use science (I mean, the real sciences) as a defence against Christianity. They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see. "
— C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)

"It is funny how mortals always picture us putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out. "
— C.S. Lewis (Screwtape Letters)

"Man Thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The world -- this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult...So much only of life as I know by experience...The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a loss of power."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [...] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know."
— Ian McEwan (Saturday)

"Our Lord's descent from the holy heights of the Mount of Transfiguration was more than a physical return from greater to lesser altitudes; it was a passing from sunshine into shadow, from the effulgent glory of heaven to the mists of worldly passions and human unbelief; it was the beginning of His rapid descent into the valley of humiliation."
— James E. Talmage (Jesus the Christ)

"From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?"
— Ray Bradbury

"The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug."
— Mark Twain (The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain: A Book of Quotations)

"Christ proclaimed: "I am the good shepherd." He then further showed, and with eloquent exactness, the difference between a shepherd and a hireling herder. The one has personal interest in and love for his flock, and knows each sheep by name, the other knows them only as a flock, the value of which is gaged by number; to the hireling they are only as so many or so much. While the shepherd is ready to fight in defense of his own, and if necessary even imperil his life for his sheep, the hireling flees when the wolf approaches, leaving the way open for the ravening beast to scatter, rend, and kill."
— James E. Talmage (Jesus the Christ)

"The world's greatest champion of woman and womanhood is Jesus the Christ."
— James E. Talmage (Jesus the Christ)

"The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom."
— Georg Wilhelm Hegel

"...our wants and desires and shaped by the society in which we live...abstract freedom, the freedom to do as we please, is effectively the freedom to be pushed to and fro by the historical and social forces of our times."
— Georg Wilhelm Hegel

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
— H.P. Lovecraft

""The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents... some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new Dark Age.""
— H.P. Lovecraft (The Call of Cthulhu)