Joe > Joe's Quotes

“I have hardly had time to think over all that you have told me. It’s a big thing for a man to have to understand and to decide at one sitting. I should like to have a quiet hour by myself to make up my mind.”
― Arthur Conan Doyle

“We’re genetically predisposed toward certain behaviors that we’ve collectively decided are unhelpful; adultery and racism are possible examples. With reasonable success, we mitigate those impulses through civil codes, religious rituals, maternal warnings—the whole bag of tricks we call culture.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let’s face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there’s a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it’s inferior.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“But a spontaneous traveler inevitably will end up with the tummy gauge suddenly on empty, in some place where cuisine is not really the point: a museum cafeteria, or late-night snack bar across from the concert hall. Eating establishments where cuisine isn’t the point—is that a strange notion?”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life

“If I keep pushing myself, I’ll finally be somebody. I’ll finally matter. I’ll finally arrive.” Nonsense. You won’t be satisfied. The only thing worse than failing to realize any of your dreams, is seeing them all come true. You were meant for something more. Even if you could be known the world over, what does it matter if you have no time to be known by God?”
― Kevin DeYoung, Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem

“And we need Christians who don’t make others feel guilty (and don’t feel guilty themselves) when one of us follows a different passion than another. I read and write a lot. That’s what I do well. But that doesn’t mean anyone should feel guilty for not reading and writing as much as I do. You have your own gifts and calling. We have to be okay with other Christians doing certain good things better and more often than we do.”
― Kevin DeYoung, Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem

“To make a name” in the language of the Bible is to construct an identity for ourselves. We either get our name—our defining essence, security, worth, and uniqueness—from what God has done for us and in us (Revelation 2:17), or we make a name through what we can do for ourselves.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Because Christians are never as good as their right beliefs should make them and non-Christians are never as bad as their wrong beliefs should make them, we will adopt a stance of critical enjoyment of human culture and its expressions in every field of work.”
― Timothy Keller, Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God's Plan for the World

“Isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?”
― L.M. Montgomery

“Nurse Duckett found Yossarian wonderful and was already trying to change him.”
― Joseph Heller

“The task is to become church for them, among them and with them, and under Spirit of God to lead them to become church in their own culture.”
― Tim Chester, Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission

“Holiness is as much about what you do on a Monday morning on the factory floor as it is about what you do on a Sunday morning in a church gathering. Holiness is as much about the kind of neighbour you are as it is about the kind of church member you are. It is as much about who you are when you are holding a steering wheel as who you are when you are holding a Bible.”
― Tim Chester, Everyday Church: Gospel Communities on Mission

“Life online is a whiplash between deep sorrow, unexpected joy, cheap laughs, profound thoughts, and dumb memes.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Frederick Catherwood rightly says "The teaching ofthe bible would appear to be that it is not the amount of a man's wealth which matters. What matters is the method by which he acquires it, how he uses it, and his attitude of mind toward it.”
― Barry Asmus, The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution

“...human beings glorify God by achieving much more than survival. We glorify Him by understanding and ruling over the creation and then producing more and more wonderful goods from it for our enjoyment, with thanksgiving to God.”
― Barry Asmus, The Poverty of Nations: A Sustainable Solution

“This is what I would have been,' Shallan thought, 'if I had not been raised in a household of fear. So this is what I will be today.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“I find nothing more frightening than a man trying to do what he has decided is important. Very little in the world has ever gone astray—at least on a grand scale—because a person decided to be frivolous”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Why does every map argue with its fellows?”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“What is a woman's place in this modern world? Jasnah Kholin's words read. I rebel against this question, though so many of my peers ask it. The inherent bias in the inquiry seems invisible to so many of them. They consider themselves progressive because they are willing to challenge many of the assumptions of the past.

They ignore the greater assumption--that a 'place' for women must be defined and set forth to begin with. Half of the population must somehow be reduced to the role arrived at by a single conversation. No matter how broad that role is, it will be--by-nature--a reduction from the infinite variety that is womanhood.

I say that there is no role for women--there is, instead, a role for each woman, and she must make it for herself. For some, it will be the role of scholar; for others, it will be the role of wife. For others, it will be both. For yet others, it will be neither.

Do not mistake me in assuming I value one woman's role above another. My point is not to stratify our society--we have done that far to well already--my point is to diversify our discourse.

A woman's strength should not be in her role, whatever she chooses it to be, but in the power to choose that role. It is amazing to me that I even have to make this point, as I see it as the very foundation of our conversation.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“It was like once Jasnah climbed into adolescence, she no longer needed a mother. I would try to get close to her, and there was this coldness, like even being near me reminded me that she had once been a child.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“Honor’ is a word applied to the actions of men from the past who have had their lives scrubbed clean by historians.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Words of Radiance

“If you're going through hell, keep going.”
― Winston Churchill

“The ease and immediacy of twitter is no match for the patient labor of prayer.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“The modern-day mantra we hear so often, 'I will follow Christ but don't bother me with organised religion', is symptomatic of the disembodied assumptions of the digital age. In reality the Christian life could not be more embodied.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“When you had your smartphone you were a walking vending-machine of whatever you'd ingested that day', she told him. 'It was difficult to talk about deeper things that mattered, because you were constantly distracted by Internet litter. You're now able to focus and give necessary attention to deeper issues.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“As a result, we suffer from Neomania - an addition to anything new within the last five minutes.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“Am I entitled to feed on the fragmented trivialities online? In other words, am I entitled to spend hours every month simply browsing odd curiosities? I get the distinct sense in Scripture that the answer is 'no'.”
― Tony Reinke, 12 Ways Your Phone Is Changing You

“I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o'clock sharp.”
― W. Somerset Maugham

“Underline in your books, jot notes in the margins, and turn the corners of your pages down. Public education is a beautiful dream, but public classrooms too often train students not to mark, write in, disfigure, or in any way make books permanently their own. You're a grownup now, so buy your own books if you possibly can. In my opinion, a cheap paperback filled with your own notes is worth five times as much as a beautiful collector's edition.”
― Susan Wise Bauer

“Right up to the closing years of the eighteenth century... scientists everywhere searched for, and sometimes believed they had actually found, things that just weren't there: vitiated airs, dephlogisticated marine acids, phloxes, calxes, terraqueous exhalations and, above all, phlogiston, the substance that was thought to be the active agent in combustion. Somewhere in all this, it was thought, there also resided a mysterious élan vital, the force that brought inanimate objects to life.”
― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything