Mark > Mark's Quotes

“that the science of this world, which has become a great power, has, especially in the last century, analysed everything divine handed down to us in the holy books. After this cruel analysis the learned of this world have nothing left of all that was sacred of old. But they have only analysed the parts and overlooked the whole, and indeed their blindness is marvellous. Yet the whole still stands steadfast before their eyes, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Has it not lasted nineteen centuries, is it not still a living, a moving power in the individual soul and in the masses of people? It is still as strong and living even in the souls of atheists, who have destroyed everything! For even those who have renounced Christianity and attack it, in their inmost being still follow the Christian ideal, for hitherto neither their subtlety nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man and of virtue than the ideal given by Christ of old. When it has been attempted, the result has been only grotesque. Remember this especially, young man, since you are being sent into the world by your departing elder. Maybe, remembering this great day, you will not forget my words, uttered from the heart for your guidance, seeing you are young, and the temptations of the world are great and beyond your strength to endure.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”1”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“(The sheer delight to be found in reading other readers’ marginalia is unforgettably rendered in Billy Collins’s poem, “Marginalia.”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“The ability to understand figurative language, in which “a word is both itself and something else,” is unique to human beings and, as one cognitive psychologist explains, “fundamental to how we think” in that it is the means by which we can “escape the literal and immediate.”27 We see this quality most dramatically in satire and allegory. Although very different, both satirical and allegorical language employ two levels of meaning: the literal meaning and the intended meaning. In satire, the intended meaning is the opposite of the stated words; in allegory, the intended meaning is symbolized by the stated words. Satire points to error, and allegory points to truth, but both require the reader to discern meaning beyond the surface level. In this way, allegory and satire—and less obviously, all literary language—reflect the transcendent nature of the human condition and the “double-willed self” described by Paul in Romans 7:19.28”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Both skill and virtue are always concerned with what is harder, because success in what is harder is superior.”49”
― Karen Swallow Prior, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

“Let all that I am wait quietly before God, for my hope is in him.”
― Anonymous

“Never speak harshly to an older man,* but appeal to him respectfully as you would to your own father. Talk to younger men as you would to your own brothers. 2 Treat older women as you would your mother, and treat younger women with all purity as you would your own sisters.”
― Anonymous, The One Year Bible, NLT

“Religion comes from a Latin root meaning “to bind,” referring to the bond of obedience that characterizes the life of a member of a religious order. By extension, religion can be thought of as a bond of unity, as a process that “re-ligaments” or “re-ligatures,” tying disparate things back together into one, integrating diverse viewpoints.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“However, when value is recognised as objective, individual preference (though it need not be utterly eradicated) is relativised, one’s private perspective is shown to be relative to the real value of beautiful things, and therefore one’s appreciation of beauty can be more or less intelligent, more or less attuned to the structures that inhere in nature and that can even sometimes be mathematically discerned (revealing the presence of such measurables as Pi, the Golden Ratio, and the Fibonacci Sequence).”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“power is better understood as an energy continually surging back and forth between two parties, not as a weapon brandished over the heads of underlings by a despotic ruler.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“In his essay “Is History Bunk?” (1957), Lewis writes, “There will always be those who, on discovering that history cannot really be turned to much practical account, will pronounce history to be Bunk. Aristotle would have called this servile or banausic; we, more civilly, may christen it Fordism.” In other words, Ford’s description of history as bunk betrays a utilitarian mindset that is unworthy of a person of liberal education; Ford does not know from the inside the thing he is disparaging. For more on this tendency to debunk things prematurely from an external perspective, see Lewis’s “Meditation in a Toolshed” (1945). ‡”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“According to Lewis, imagination was “the organ of meaning,” while reason was “the natural organ of truth,” and it was always his aim in his writing to combine the two organs as fully and naturally as possible, whatever the communicative task in hand. Works of philosophy, no less than works of creative fiction, required the marriage of fertile imagination and penetrating reason.”
― Michael Ward, After Humanity: A Guide to C.S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

“But just remember, there is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done. (Don't send hate letters, please!)”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The victory achieved by Jesus didn’t stop Paul from being shipwrecked, but it did mean that when he got to Rome to announce God as king and Jesus as Lord, he would know that he came with the scent of victory already in his nostrils. The God who defeated death through Jesus and rescued Paul from the depths of the sea would enable him to look worldly emperors in the face without flinching.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“When, in June 2015, relatives of the murder victims in Charleston, South Carolina, came face-to-face with the killer, several of them told him at once that they forgave him. Something similar happened after the Amish school shooting in October 2006. These incidents, widely reported, strike secular journalists and their readers as strange to the point of being almost incredible. Do these people really mean it? It is clear that they do. The forgiveness was unforced. It wasn’t said through clenched teeth, in outward conformity to a moral standard, while the heart remained bitter. Forgiveness was already a way of life in these communities. They were merely exemplifying and extending, in horrific circumstances, the character they had already learned and practiced.”
― N.T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus's Crucifixion

“Just because we want to think clearly, that doesn’t mean we can escape the methodological demands of Christian virtue. To cash these out: it requires humility, to understand the thoughts of people who thought differently from ourselves; patience, to go on working with the data and resist premature conclusions; penitence, to acknowledge that our traditions may have distorted original meanings and that we have preferred the distortions to the originals; and love, in that genuine history, like all genuine knowledge, involves the delighted affirmation of realities and events outside ourselves, and thoughts different from our own.”
― N.T. Wright, History and Eschatology: Jesus and the Promise of Natural Theology

“The scribes and Pharisees “began to reason” (dialogizesthai); we might also construe this as “rationalize,” and it would make sense of their discourse as to purpose. They see the evidence that, for Jesus, forgiveness is somehow integral to the man’s healing and see the healing itself therefore as blasphemy, since they believe that none but God can forgive sins (5:21). As a species of legal reasoning, given the eyewitness evidence they have chosen to exclude (a miracle has taken place and must owe to some power greater than human reason), their logic is, ironically, “reasonable.” This is one of those instances of which one may, however, say with Lord Peter Wimsey (in Dorothy Sayers’s novel Whose Body?), “There is nothing you can’t prove, if only your outlook is sufficiently limited.” Jesus knows their mind and motive and reveals them to themselves with one devastating question, “Why are you reasoning in your hearts?” (5:22)—a phrase indicating that he knows well enough that their motive has malice—followed by another: “Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven you’ or to say, ‘Rise up and walk’?” (5:23).”
― David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible):

“As for the apostles, Luke tells us, once they had returned from their mission, they told him “all that they had done” (9:10a). One would like to have a record of this—and not least an account of what was said by Judas. Yet the verb Luke uses here is diēgēsanto (“they recounted”), a verbal form of the noun Luke uses to describe the genre in which he himself has written (diēgēsis), further strengthening our sense of his Gospel as a gathering of oral reports from participants or eyewitnesses.”
― David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible):

“Psalms as location; he clearly knows the scriptures very well. Psalm 110 was seen in the first century as Davidic; the Septuagint superscription notes this, so that conventional debates about whether this psalm is or is not by David seem moot. Jesus says so, and he was doubtless aware that it was regarded by everyone as a royal psalm, even a coronation anthem (Bock 1994–96: 2.1636–37).”
― David Lyle Jeffrey, Luke (Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible):

“But even so, amid the tornadoed Atlantic of my being, do I myself still for ever centrally disport in mute calm; and while ponderous planets of unwaning woe revolve round me, deep down and deep inland there I still bathe me in eternal mildness of joy.”
― Herman Melville, Moby Dick

“The church lives by and in its action of testimony. The confluence of the imagery of lamps and olive trees suggests, perhaps, that the oil of testimony will never be exhausted, that the church’s lamp will perpetually be replenished by the one who is himself God’s anointed.”
― Joseph L. Mangina, Revelation

“Imagination ignites the mundane. Think of the bush where Moses witnesses the holy presence of God. Imagination invites us into a world that transcends our world so we can return to our world transformed by the conversion of our thinking.”
― Scot McKnight, Revelation for the Rest of Us: A Prophetic Call to Follow Jesus as a Dissident Disciple