Nick > Nick's Quotes

“Pride,” said the hermit to his guests, “has destroyed an angel created for good. It is the stumbling-block against which the destinies of man strike. You cannot reason with pride, the principal of all the vices, since, by its very nature, the proud man refuses to listen to it...”
― Jules Verne

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”
― Deitrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship

“The function of prayer is not to influence God, but rather to change the nature of the one who prays.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“You made them hate me." Said Ender
"So? What will you do about it? Crawl in a corner? Start kissing their little backsides so they'll love you again? There's only one thing that will make them stop hating you. And that's being so good at what you do that they can't ignore you. I told them you were the best. Now you damn well better be." -Graff”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender’s Game

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.”
― Isaac Asimov, Foundation

“Perhaps it's impossible to wear an identity without becoming what you pretend to be.”
― Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”
― Galileo Galilei, Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina

“...we've gone all the way from foolishly accepting authority to foolishly rejecting all authority.”
― Eric Metaxas, 7 Men: And the Secret of Their Greatness

“You see, but you do not observe.”
― Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A Scandal in Bohemia

“There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“Presents are made for the pleasure of who gives them, not the merits of who receives them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind

“The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to seekers after it.”
― Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd

“And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray's
In deepest consequence”
― William Shakespeare

“We never grow closer to God when we just live life. It takes deliberate pursuit and attentiveness.”
― Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

“Visit many good books, but live in the Bible.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“It is not what you meant to say, but it is what your saying meant.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr.

“One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one.”
― Denis Diderot

“Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls-- family, health, friends, integrity-- are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.”
― Gary Keller, The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

“We can no more assist the Holy Spirit in the quickening of our souls to spiritual life than Lazarus could help Jesus raise him from the dead.”
― R.C. Sproul, The Mystery of the Holy Spirit

“Unhappy the land that is in need of heroes”
― Bertolt Brecht, Galileo

“Enemy-occupied territory---that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Well and good if all things change, O Lord God, provided I am rooted in You.”
― St. John of the Cross

“Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.”
― Michael Crichton, Timeline

“Between the scribe who has read and the prophet who has seen there is a difference as wide as the sea. We are today overrun with orthodox scribes, but the prophets, where are they? The hard voice of the scribe sounds over evangelicalism, but the Church waits for the tender voice of the saint who has penetrated the veil and has gazed with inward eye upon the Wonder that is God. And yet, thus to penetrate, to push in sensitive living experience into the holy Presence, is a privilege open to every child of God.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

“We need never shout across the spaces to an absent God. He is nearer than our own soul, closer than our most secret thoughts”
― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

“Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Angel's Game