"Any profession of faith…entrusts the mind and heart to a truth that cannot be proven but can be lived."
— Luke Timothy Johnson (The Creed: What Christians Believe and Why it Matters)

"In the glad old days, before the rise of modern morbidities...it used to be thought a disadvantage to be misunderstood."
— G.K. Chesterton (Heretics)

"The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously."
— Hubert H. Humphrey

"I am not young enough to know everything."
— Oscar Wilde

"Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled."
— Herman Wouk (This Is My God: The Jewish Way of Life)

"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"The more women want to resemble [men], the less women will govern them, and then men will truly be their masters."
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"You can't hold a man down without staying down with him."
— Booker T. Washington

"Drink because you are happy, but never because you are miserable."
— G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)

"I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."
— Booker T. Washington

"The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique."
— G.K. Chesterton (Heretics: The Annotated)

"The optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and the pessimist fears this is true."
— James Branch Cabell

"Whenever a man does a thouroughly stupid thing, it is always from the noblest of motives."
— Oscar Wilde

"Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms."
— G.K. Chesterton

"England and the English governing class never did call on this absurd deity of race until it seemed, for and instant, that they had no other god to call on…the truth of the whole matter is very simple. Nationality exists, and has nothing in the world to do with race. Nationality is a thing like a church or a secret society. It is the product of the human soul and will; it is a spiritual product. And there are men…who would think anything and do anything rather than admit anything could be a spiritual product."
— G.K. Chesterton

"The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered...it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful."
— G.K. Chesterton

"[M]an has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily "true" or "false," but as "academic" or "practical," "outworn" or "contemporary," "conventional" or "ruthless." Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous—that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about."
— C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)

"Journalism largely consists in saying "Lord Jones is dead" to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive."
— G.K. Chesterton

"All enchantments die; only cowards die with them."
— Charles Morgan

"A man who says that no patriot should attack the [war] until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men…he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, "I am sorry to say we are ruined," and is not sorry at all…Granted that he states only facts, it is still essential to know what are his emotions, what is his motive. It may be that twelve hundred men in Tottenham are down with smallpox; but we want to know whether this is stated by some great philosopher who wants to curse the gods, or only by some common clergyman who wants to help the men."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind."
— G.K. Chesterton

"If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"There is only one thing that can never go past a certain point in its alliance with oppression--and that is orthodoxy. I may, it is true, twist orthodoxy so as partly to justify a tyrant. But I can easily make up a German philosophy to justify him entirely."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister."
— G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)

"There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus."
— Blaise Pascal (Pensees)

"When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in confederacy against him."
— Jonathan Swift

"Have you been asking God what He is going to do? He will never tell you. God does not tell you what He is going to do; He reveals to you Who He is."
— Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday)

"If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religious shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in his presence."
— Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday)

"God nowhere tells us to give up things for the sake of giving them up. He tells us to give them up for the sake of the only thing worth having--viz., life with Himself. It is a question of loosening the bonds that hinder the life..."
— Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday)

"Oscar Wilde: "I wish I had said that." Whistler: "You will, Oscar; you will.
"
— James McNeill Whistler

"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem."
— Booker T. Washington

"I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
— Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery: An Autobiography)

"I early learned that it is a hard matter to convert an individual by abusing him, and that this is more often accomplished by giving credit for all the praiseworthy actions performed than by calling attention alone to all the evil done."
— Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery: an autobiography)

"It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of those privileges."
— Booker T. Washington (Up from Slavery: an autobiography)

"The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly."
— Søren Kierkegaard

"If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud."
— Émile Zola

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."
— William Shakespeare (Julius Caesar)

"The ultimate result of shielding men from the effects of folly is to fill the world with fools."
— Herbert Spencer

"...the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs."
— George Eliot (Middlemarch)

"For paradise we long. For perfection we were made...This longing is the source of the hunger and dissatisfaction that mark our lives...This longing makes our loves and friendships possible, and so very unsatisfactory. The hunger is for...nothing less than perfect communion with the...one in whom all the fragments of our scattered existence come together...we must not stifle this longing. It is a holy dissatisfaction. Such dissatisfaction is not a sickness to be healed, but the seed of a promise to be fulfilled...The only death to fear is the death of settling for something less."
— Richard John Neuhaus (Death on a Friday Afternoon: Meditations on the Last Words of Jesus from the Cross)

"Extrapolations are the last refuge of a groundless argument."
— Thomas Sowell (The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy)

"The staunchest conservatives advocate a range of changes which differ in specifics, rather than in number or magnitude, from the changes advocated by those considered liberal…change, as such, is simply not a controversial issue. Yet a common practice among the anointed is to declare themselves emphatically, piously, and defiantly in favor of 'change.' Thus those who oppose their particular changes are depicted as being against change in general. It is as if opponents of the equation 2+2=7 were depicted as being against mathematics. Such a tactic might, however, be more politically effective than trying to defend the equation on its own merits. "
— Thomas Sowell (The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy)

"What sense would it make to classify a man as handicapped because he is in a wheelchair today, if he is expected to be walking again in a month, and competing in track meets before the year is out? Yet Americans are generally given 'class' labels on the basis of their transient location in the income stream. If most Americans do not stay in the same broad income bracket for even a decade, their repeatedly changing 'class' makes class itself a nebulous concept. Yet the intelligentsia are habituated, if not addicted, to seeing the world in class terms."
— Thomas Sowell (The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis for Social Policy)

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others."
— Ayn Rand

"Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Suppose God wants to teach you to say, "I know how to be abased"--are you ready to be offered up like that? Are you ready to be not so much as a drop in a bucket--to be so hopelessly insignificant that you are never thought of again in connection with the life you served? Are you willing to spend and be spent; not seeking to be ministered unto, but to minister?"
— Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday)

"We imagine that whatever is unpleasant is our duty! Is that anything like the spirit of our Lord, "I *delight* to do Thy will, O My God.""
— Oswald Chambers (My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for Everyday)

"This is love: to fly toward a secret sky, to cause a hundred veils to fall each moment. First to let go of life. Finally, to take a step without feet."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"Love comes with a knife, not some shy question, and not with fears for its reputation!"
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

"I was a thorn rushing to be with a rose, vinegar blending with honey…
Then I found some dirt to make an ointment that would honor my soul…
Love says, “You are right,
but don’t claim these changes.
Remember, I am wind. You are an ember I ignite."
— Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi