Scott Meadows > Scott's Quotes

“You have been given questions to which you cannot be given answers. You will have to live them out - perhaps a little at a time.'
And how long is that going to take?'
I don't know. As long as you live, perhaps.'
That could be a long time.'
I will tell you a further mystery,' he said. 'It may take longer.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“A shelf of loved books is an arsenal of memories.” -Andrew Peterson, Foreword.”
― Douglas Kaine McKelvey, Every Moment Holy

“Have read little and understood less.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“your life is a book
it is more than its first and last page
and is mostly made up of 'and's and 'the's”
― Keaton Henson, Idiot Verse

“If a man is known by the company he keeps, so also his character is reflected in the books he reads.”
― J. Oswald Sanders, Spiritual Leadership: Principles of Excellence for Every Believer

“...I was a young man. I hardly knew what I knew, let alone what I was going to know.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“In my experience, when we surrender all to the greatest Artist, that Artist fills us with the Spirit and makes us even more. creative and aware of the greater reality all about us. By "giving up" our "art," we are, paradoxically, made into true artists of the Kingdom. This is the paradox Blake was addressing. Unless we become makers in the image of the Maker, we labor in vain. Whether we are plumbers, garbage collectors, taxi drivers, or CEOs, we are called by the Great Artist to co-create. The Artist calls us little-'a' artists to co-create, to share in the "heavenly breaking in" to the broken earth.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Art and Faith: A Theology of Making

“Some nights in the midst of this loneliness I swung among the scattered stars at the end of the thin thread of faith alone.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“I have always loved a window, especially an open one.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“Some of the best things I have ever thought of I have thought of during bad sermons.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“To love anything good, at any cost, is a bargain.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe, whether it calls itself my home, my fatherland, or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use -- silence, exile, and cunning.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful. What the beautiful is is another question.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“Whatever else is unsure in this stinking dunghill of a world a mother's love is not.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“To discover the mode of life or of art whereby my spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”
― James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

“You mustn’t wish for another life. You mustn’t want to be somebody else. What you must do is this:
“Rejoice evermore.
Pray without ceasing.
In everything give thanks.”
I am not all the way capable of so much, but those are the right instructions.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“You think you will never forget any of this, you will remember it always just the way it was. But you can't remember it the way it was. To know it, you have to be living in the presence of it right as it is happening. It can return only by surprise. Speaking of these things tells you that there are no words for them that are equal to them or that can restore them to your mind. And so you have a life that you are living only now, now and now and now, gone before you can speak of it, and you must be thankful for living day by day, moment by moment, in this presence.
But you have a life too that you remember. It stays with you. YOu have lived a life in the breath and pulse and living light of the present, and your memories of it, remember now, are of a different life in a different world and time. When you remember the past, you are not remembering it as it was. You are remembering it as it is. It is a vision or a dream, present with you in the present, alive with you in the only time you are alive.”
― Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter

“Uncle Burley said hills always looked blue when you were far away from them. That was a pretty color for hills; the little houses and barns and fields looked so neat and quiet tucked against them. It made you want to be close to them. But he said that when you got close they were like the hills you’d left, and when you looked back your own hills were blue and you wanted to go back again. He said he reckoned a man could wear himself out going back and forth.”
― Wendell Berry, Nathan Coulter

“Like the flowing River that is yet always present, time that is always going is always coming. Time that is told by death and birth is held and redeemed by love which is always present. Time then is told by loves losses and by the coming of love and by love continuing ingratitude for what is lossed. It is folded and enfolded and unfolded forever and ever the love by which the dead are alive and the unborn welcomed into the womb. The great question for the old and the dying I think is not if they have loved and been loved enough but if they have been grateful enough for love received and given however much. No one who has gratitude is the onlyest one. Let us pray to be grateful to the last.”
― Wendell Berry

“Taking this enthusiastic exhortation as a model, here we see the divine endorsement of sensible pleasures, that is, things that we enjoy through our bodily senses.

Things we see-the brilliant purples, reds, and oranges of a sunset; the diamond blanket of stars arrayed every night; the panoramic glory of a fertile valley seen from the top of a mountain; the majesty of a well-cultivated garden in early summer.

Things we hear-the steady crashing of waves on a shoreline; the songs of birds in early spring after the long silence of winter; the soul-stirring harmony of strings, woodwinds, brass, and percussion; the innocent refreshment of laughter of children.

Things we smell-the fragrance of roses, the aroma of pine, the delightful odor of cedar, the scene of a home cooked meal.

Things we taste-the warm sweetness of chocolate chip cookies, the puckering sour of a glass of lemonade, the heavenly savoriness of a plate piled high with bacon, the surprising ye delightful bitterness of herbs, the piercing saltiness of well-seasoned meat.

And things we touch-the cool smoothness of cotton bedsheets, the warm comfort of a wool blanket, the reassuring strength of a hug from a friend, the soft tenderness of a kiss from your spouse.

All of these are gifts from God for our enjoyment.”
― Joe Rigney

“The God, who is greater than God, has only one thing on Her mind, and that is to drop, endlessly, rose petals on our heads. Behold the One who can't take His eyes off of you. Marinate in the vastness of that.”
― Gregory Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“I believe that many who find that "nothing happens" when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.”
― C.S. Lewis, On the Incarnation

“We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century - the blindness about which posterity will ask, "But how could they have thought that?" - lies where we have never suspected it... None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
― C.S. Lewis, On the Incarnation

“Whenever I see the alcove of a tastefully built Japanese room, I marvel at our comprehension of the secrets of shadows, our sensitive use of shadow and light. For the beauty of the alcove is not the work of some clever device. An empty space is marked off with plain wood and plain walls, so that the light drawn into its forms dim shadows within emptiness. There is nothing more. And yet, when we gaze into the darkness that gathers behind the crossbeam, around the flower vase, beneath the shelves, though we know perfectly well it is mere shadow, we are overcome with the feeling that in this small corner of the atmosphere there reigns complete and utter silence; that here in the darkness immutable tranquility holds sway.”
― Junichiro Tanizaki, In Praise of Shadows

“[Quomodo stilla aquae modica, multo infusa vino, deficere a se tota videtur, dum et saporem vini induit, et colorem; et quomodo ferrum ignitum et candens, igni simillimum fit, pristina propriaque forma exutum; et quomodo solis luce perfusus aer in eamdem transformatur luminis claritatem, adeo ut non tam illuminatus, quam ipsum lumen esse videatur: sic omnem tunc in sanctis humanam affectionem quodam ineffabili modo necesse erit a semetipsa liquescere, atque in Dei penitus transfundi voluntatem.]
As a drop of water poured into wine loses itself, and takes the color and savor of wine; or as a bar of iron, heated red-hot, becomes like fire itself, forgetting its own nature; or as the air, radiant with sun-beams, seems not so much to be illuminated as to be light itself; so in the saints all human affections melt away by some unspeakable transmutation into the will of God.”
― Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God (Volume 13)

“Now the story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened: and one must be content to accept it in the same way, remembering that it is God’s myth where the others are men’s myths: i.e., the Pagan stories are God expressing Himself through the minds of poets, using such images as He found there, while Christianity is God expressing Himself through what we call 'real things'.”
― C.S. Lewis

“To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph

“Humility is perfect quietness of heart. It is to expect nothing, to wonder at nothing that is done to me, to feel nothing done against me. It is to be at rest when nobody praises me, and when I am blamed or despised. It is to have a blessed home in the Lord, where I can go in and shut the door, and kneel to my Father in secret, and am at peace as in a deep sea of calmness, when all around and above is trouble.”
― Andrew Murray

“...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.”
― Timothy Keller, The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness

“Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
― Franz Kafka