Emmanuel > Emmanuel's Quotes

“Ah well, that is a missionary’s life; to plant where another shall reap.”
― Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop

“Some guys are like that. If lightning hits a tree in a thousand-acre forest, they’ll be standing underneath it.”
― Clifford D. Simak, They Walked Like Men

“An artist is a mathematician who knows the formulas of the soul.”
― Dean Koontz, The House at the End of the World

“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Go and sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”
― Abba Moses

“Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer

“Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson

“Nothing about a literature can be more essential than the language it uses. A language has its own personality; implies an outlook, reveals a mental activity, and has a resonance, not quite the same as those of any other.”
― C.S. Lewis

“One might have expected the High Faries to have been expelled by science; I think they were actually expelled by a darkening of superstition.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“Literature exists to teach what is useful, to honour what deserves honour, to appreciate what is delightful. The useful, honourable, and delightful things are superior to it: it exists for their sake; its own use, honour, or delightfulness is derivative from theirs. In that sense, the art is humble even when the artists are proud.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“Every Model is a construct of answered questions.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“Only those who decline to scramble up the career ladder are interesting as human beings. Nothing is more boring than a man with a career.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956

“You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.”
― Alexander Solzhenitsyn

“Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.”
― J. D. Salinger

“What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though.”
― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say 'My tooth is aching' than to say 'My heart is broken'. Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause is not faced or not recognised, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. But some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their characters till they become like tempered steel.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“At the end of life we will not be judged by how many diplomas we have received, how much money we have made, how many great things we have done.
We will be judged by "I was hungry, and you gave me something to eat, I was naked and you clothed me. I was homeless, and you took me in.”
― Mother Teresa

“My life is passed in making bad jokes and seeing them turn into true prophecies.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Irish Impressions