Jeff Lilly > Jeff's Quotes

“When all is said and done, we are in the end absolutely dependent on the universe; and into sacrifices and surrenders of some sort, deliberately looked at and accepted, we are drawn and pressed as into our only permanent positions of repose. Now in those states of mind which fall short of religion, the surrender is submitted to as an imposition of necessity, and the sacrifice is undergone at the very best without complaint. In the religious life, on the contrary, surrender and sacrifice are positively espoused: even unnecessary givings-up are added in order that the happiness may increase. Religion thus makes easy and felicitous what in any case is necessary.”
― William James

“Having replaced instinct with language, society, and culture, we are the only species that depends on teaching and learning. We aren’t human without them. In them is true power. But are they the occupations of the rich and mighty?”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way

“I am a bundle of suppressed instincts held together with spit and coffee.”
― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

“The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”
― Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment

“God got angry at humanity for daring to build a tower to reach heaven. He made everyone speak different languages so no one understood anyone else. But this Irishman went around and talked to all the different people—unfortunately the story doesn't say how he did this—but he and his colleagues took the best bits of all the newly created languages and put them back together to create Irish. The inference is, 'We should write in Irish because it's made up of all the best bits of language created by God at the Tower of Babel. It's really the original language, so they must be speaking Irish in heaven.”
― Carmel McCaffrey, In Search of Ancient Ireland: The Origins of the Irish from Neolithic Times to the Coming of the English

“Books’ve got to have a name on ’em so’s everyone knows who’s guilty.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“Sometimes life reaches that desperate point where the wrong thing to do has to be the right thing to do.”
― Terry Pratchett, Maskerade

“Gods might note the fall of a sparrow but they don’t make any effort to catch them.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“Don’t be ridiculous, man,” said Ridcully, “there’s no such thing as dwarf smuggling.” “Yeah? Then what’s that you’ve got there?” “I’m a giant,” said Casanunda. “Giants are a lot bigger.” “I’ve been ill.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“The prophet speaks of things that will be true in the future because they are true in all time. The prophet disrupts the mundane in order to reveal the eternal.”
― Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art

“He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again