Dan > Dan's Quotes

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“It'll be all right." Julia's gentleness makes it worse. "In the end, Jace."
"It doesn't feel very all right."
"That's because it's not the end.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

“Let our gladness proclaim that we serve a good Master.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening: A New Edition of the Classic Devotional Based on The Holy Bible, English Standard Version

“But lo, one sins, and another suffers. Justice”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening: A New Edition of the Classic Devotional Based on The Holy Bible, English Standard Version

“But sin is more than a stain. Sin is a wound; it needs to be treated, healed. This”
― Pope Francis, The Name of God Is Mercy

“To love, and to lose what we love, are equally things appointed for our nature. If we cannot bear the second well, that evil is ours.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, 'Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that's the whole art and joy of words.'

A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the center of your soul for years which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you'll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces

“Grief is an amputation, but hope is incurable hemophilia: you bleed and bleed and bleed. Like”
― David Mitchell, Slade House

“You can have tons of talent, but it won’t necessarily keep you fed. If you have sharp instincts, though, you’ll never go hungry.”
― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.”
― A.W. Tozer

“Every moment of obscure service makes the hall of fame in heaven.”
― Zack Eswine, Sensing Jesus: Life and Ministry as a Human Being

“Somehow proper prayer must put more trust in God’s will than in human wants; otherwise failure to get the things we want will force us to doubt either the power of prayer or the ability of God.”
― Bryan Chapell, Praying Backwards: Transform Your Prayer Life by Beginning in Jesus' Name

“God,’ said Pascal, ‘instituted prayer in order to lend to His creatures the dignity of causality.”
― C.S. Lewis, The World's Last Night: And Other Essays

“The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained”
― Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality. ”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“It is funny how mortals always picture us as putting things into their minds: in reality our best work is done by keeping things out.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“When two humans have lived together for many years it usually happens that each has tones of voice and expressions of face which are almost unendurably irritating to the other. Work on that. Bring fully into the consciousness of your patient that particular lift of his mother's eyebrows which he learned to dislike in the nursery, and let him think how much he dislikes it. Let him assume that she knows how annoying it is and does it to annoy - if you know your job he will not notice the immense improbability of the assumption. And, of course, never let him suspect that he has tones and looks which similarly annoy her. As he cannot see or hear himself, this easily managed.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Richard Rohr reminds us that “we cannot attain the presence of God. We’re already totally in the presence of God. What’s absent is awareness.”
― David G. Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery

“When someone asked if he had ever doubted the North’s final victory, he shot back, “Never for a moment.” He quoted Seward, saying “that there was always just enough virtue in this republic to save it; sometimes none to spare, but still enough to meet the emergency, and he agreed with Mr. Seward in this view.”
― Ron Chernow, Grant

“Your deepest moments of happiness don’t come from doing easy things; they come from realizing your potential and overcoming your own limiting beliefs about yourself.”
― Scott H. Young, Ultralearning: The Essential Guide To Mastering Hard Skills And Future-Proofing Your Career

“The only man who has the right to say that he is justified by grace alone is the man who has left all to follow Christ. Such a man knows that the call to discipleship is a gift of grace, and that the call is inseparable from the grace. But those who try to use this grace as a dispensation from following Christ are simply deceiving themselves.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations. Once people get used to a certain luxury, they take it for granted. Then they begin to count on it. Finally they reach a point where they can’t live without it.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”
― Dorothy L. Sayers, Creed or Chaos? and Lost Tools of Learning

“The Bible does not say that every difficulty is the result of sin—but it does teach that every sin will bring you into difficulty.”
― Timothy J. Keller, The Prodigal Prophet: Jonah and the Mystery of God's Mercy

“Wordsworth felt horrified and utterly alone. ‘How oft, amid those overflowing streets, / Have I gone forward with the crowd, and said / Unto myself, “The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery!”’5”
― Edmund Richardson, The King's Shadow: Obsession, Betrayal, and the Deadly Quest for the Lost City of Alexandria

“I think a lot of us need to forget about God’s will for my life. God cares more about our response to His Spirit’s leading today, in this moment, than about what we intend to do next year.”
― Francis Chan, Forgotten God: Reversing Our Tragic Neglect of the Holy Spirit

“Thus this spiritual love will speak to Christ about a brother more than to a brother about Christ.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

“Behind every system of actions are a system of beliefs.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones

“Progress requires unlearning. Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand your identity.”
― James Clear, Atomic Habits: An Easy and Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones