Mark > Mark's Quotes

“You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“How is it, that for many of us, being a good Christian is nothing more than being a good person? The entire focus of our faith has been the elimination of sin, which is important but inadequate; rather than the unleashing of a unique, original, extraordinary, wonderfully untamed, faith.”
― Erwin McManus

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which 'Escape' is now so often used. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls?”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“Moral #1: "If you work hard, stay focused, and never give up, you will eventually get what you want in life."

Moral #2: Sometimes the things we want most in life are the things that will kill us.”
― Donald Miller

“One word, Ma'am," he said, coming back from the fire; limping, because of the pain. "One word. All you've been saying is quite right, I shouldn't wonder. I'm a chap who always liked to know the worst and then put the best face I can on it. So I won't deny any of what you said. But there's one more thing to be said, even so. Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things-trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a kingdom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that's a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We're just babies making up a game, if you're right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That's why I'm going to stand by the play world. I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia. So, thanking you kindly for our supper, if these two gentlemen and the young lady are ready, we're leaving your court at once and setting out in the dark to spend our lives looking for Overland. Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that's a small loss if the world's as dull a place as you say.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

“You can safely assume you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”
― Anne Lamott

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

“Just because we don't understand doesn't mean that the explanation doesn't exist.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Around here, however, we don't look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things, because we're curious...and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.”
― Walt Disney Company

“The national anthem of Hell is 'I did it my way.”
― Peter Kreeft

“I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.”
― C. S. Lewis

“Believing in God is as much like falling in love as it is making a decision. Love is both something that happens to you and something you decide upon.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“If we are not willing to wake up in the morning and die to ourselves, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether or not we are really following Jesus.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the “Dawn Treader”

“Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I think the things we want most in life, the things we think will set us free, are not the thing we need.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Faith is not the belief that God will do what you want. It is the belief that God will do what is right.”
― Max Lucado, He Still Moves Stones: Everyone Needs a Miracle

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Human beings by their very nature are worshipers. Worship is not something we do; it defines who we are. You cannot divide human beings into those who worship and those who don’t. Everybody worships; it’s just a matter of what, or whom, we serve.”
― Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer's Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“There's a lovely Hasidic story of a rabbi who always told his people that if they studied the Torah, it would put Scripture on their hearts. One of them asked, "Why on our hearts, and not in them?" The rabbi answered, "Only God can put Scripture inside. But reading sacred text can put it on your heart, and then when your hearts break, the holy words will fall inside.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?"
A great Shadow has departed," said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King

“He was saving innocents and serving truth. And in the final judgement, what is more important? The burdens we bear -- or the way we bear them?”
― Kurt Busiek, Astro City, Vol. 2: Confession

“Take the case of courage. No quality has ever so much addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice.

He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more: it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who dies for the sake of dying.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“But even if religion makes no sense to you, you need to make sense of religion to to make sense of the world.”
― Stephen R. Prothero, God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World--and Why Their Differences Matter

“We cannot live unaffected by love. We are most alive when we find it, most devastated when we lose it, most empty when we give up on it, most inhumane when we betray it, and most passionate when we pursue it.”
― Erwin Raphael McManus, Soul Cravings: An Exploration of the Human Spirit