Emily > Emily's Quotes

“And this is the thing about soft totalitarianism: It seduces those – even Christians – who have lost the capacity to love enduringly, for better or for worse. They think love, but they merely desire. They think they follow Jesus, but in fact, they merely admire him. Each of us thinks we wouldn’t be like that. But if we have accepted the lie of our therapeutic culture, which tells us that personal happiness is the greatest good of all, then we will surrender at the first sign of trouble.”
― Rod Dreher, Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents

“Faithfulness does not feel like what it is accomplishing. We have gotten so consumed with feelings needing to be pleasant that we have discarded the generally unpleasant feelings of faithfulness. It doesn’t feel good, so it cannot be good. But discarding the feelings of faithfulness discards the fruits of it.”
― Rachel Jankovic, You Who? Why You Matter and How to Deal with It

“To protect women’s rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. If postmodernism is correct—that the body itself is a social construct—then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.”
― Nancy R. Pearcey, Love Thy Body: Answering Hard Questions about Life and Sexuality

“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
― Jane Austen, Mansfield Park

“Is everything sad going to come untrue?' asks Sam[wise Gamgee]. Here we find, beyond all imagination, the deepest source of hope for the human story. For when the King is revealed, 'there will be no more night.' The Shadow will finally and forever be lifted from the earth. The Great War will be won.
This King, who brings strength and healing in His hands, will make everything sad come untrue.”
― Joseph Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

“Tolkien shares his Christian belief that evil represents a rejection of God and the joy and beauty and virtue that originate in him.22 Evil is a mutation, a parasite, an interloper. It is an ancient Darkness that fears and despises the Light. At war with the good, it is an immensely powerful force in human life and human societies. “If anguish were visible,” Tolkien once explained, “almost the whole of this benighted planet would be enveloped in a dense dark vapor, shrouded from the amazed vision of the heavens!”23”
― Joseph Loconte, A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

“Who knows what the future holds? Only the One God,” explained Aidan. “You just live the little bit of life that you can see in front of you. You live it well. And that gets you ready for whatever unfolds next.”
― Jonathan Rogers, The Bark of the Bog Owl

“Once we embrace Christ, we are instantly made righteous because of his righteousness, and not because of anything we have done or could do. So our good works do not earn us God’s favor. That favor we already possess, even though we are sinners who sin and cannot help sinning. By turning to God in faith—as sinners who understand that we are sinners—and by crying out for God’s help, we do all we can by acknowledging our helplessness. At this point—in which our faith acknowledges the truth of our situation—we are instantly clothed with the righteousness of God. And it is now our gratitude to God for this free gift of his righteousness and salvation that makes us want to please him with our good works. We do them not out of grievous and legalistic duty or out of a hope to earn his favor but out of sheer gratitude for the favor we already have. Our service to him is redeemed and transmuted into a free servitude. That is the power of faith in Christ. All that is base and dead can be redeemed by faith unto glory and life. Luther summed it up in this typically colorful image. “Is this not a joyous exchange,” he asks, “the rich, noble, pious bridegroom Christ takes this poor, despised wicked little whore in marriage, redeems her of all evil, and adorns her with all his goods?”
― Eric Metaxas, Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

“The first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb, when it comes, find us doing sensible and human things -- praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts -- not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Bathsheba loved Troy in the way that only self-reliant women love when they abandon their self-reliance. When a strong woman recklessly throws away her strength she is worse than a weak woman who has never any strength to throw away. One source of her inadequacy is the novelty of the occasion. She has never had practice in making the best of such a condition. Weakness is doubly weak by being new.”
― Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd

“That is one of the great mistakes people make: assuming that someone who does menial work does not like thinking. Physical labor is great for the mind, as it leaves all kinds of time to consider the world. Other work, like accounting or scribing, demands little of the body—but siphons energy from the mind.

If you wish to become a storyteller, here is a hint: sell your labor, but not your mind. Give me ten hours a day scrubbing a deck, and oh the stories I could imagine. Give me ten hours adding sums, and all you’ll have me imagining at the end is a warm bed and a thought-free evening.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Even small actions have consequences. And while we can often choose our actions, we rarely get to choose our consequences.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“Heroism is often the seemingly spontaneous result of a lifetime of preparation.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“It might seem that the person who can feel for others is doomed in life. Isn’t one person’s pain enough? Why must a person like Tress feel for two, or more? Yet I’ve found that the people who are the happiest are the ones who learn best how to feel. It takes practice, you know. Effort. And those who (late in life) have been feeling for two, three, or a thousand different people…well, turns out they’ve had a leg up on everyone else all along. Empathy is an emotional loss leader. It pays for itself eventually.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Tress of the Emerald Sea

“No one can give you faith. It is a gift from God alone. Seek and ye shall find.”
― Jennifer Worth, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

“It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying.
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons—marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning.
One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as "intemperate" as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily: bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not deceived by externals.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go... But, of course, ceasing to be "in love" need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense — love as distinct from "being in love" — is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriage) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God... "Being in love" first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Shake the hand that feeds you.”
― Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

“Bitterness differs from unbelief merely in the intensity and depth—in the degree—of its rebellion. As my friend Andy Farmer has pointed out, the two are distinguished simply by the difference between can’t and won’t. Unbelief says, “I can’t do this,” while bitterness says, “I won’t do this.” Unbelief tells a spouse, “You can’t change,” and bitterness declares, “You won’t change.” Unbelief claims, “God can’t affect what I like and dislike”; while bitterness says, “God won’t affect them.”
― Dave Harvey, When Sinners Say "I Do": Discovering the Power of the Gospel for Marriage

“I make a go of it, when I can. It’s not my disposition to…what I mean to say is, I learned a long time ago that my happiness has to be separate from the things beyond my control.”
― Beth Brower, The Unselected Journals of Emma M. Lion: Vol. 3