Dustan > Dustan's Quotes

“We don't want to feel less when we have finished a book; we want to feel that new possibilities of being have been opened to us. We don't want to close a book with a sense that life is totally unfair and that there is no light in the darkness; we want to feel that we have been given illumination.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water

“I don't understand it any more than you do, but one thing I've learned is that you don't have to understand things for them to be.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time

“For as bats’ eyes are to daylight so is our intellectual eye to those truths which are, in their own nature, the most obvious of all. ARISTOTLE,”
― C.S. Lewis, Miracles

“The bottom line is that we must learn to rule with the heart of a servant and serve with the heart of a king.”
― Bill Johnson, Born for Significance: Master the Purpose, Process, and Peril of Promotion

“The Interpreter then began to explain the meaning of the painting. “The man you see in this picture is one in a thousand. He can produce children,36 labor in birth pains,37 and nurse them himself when they are born. And do you see his eyes looking to heaven, the Bible in his hands, and the law of truth on his lips?” Christian nodded, listening intently to the Interpreter’s every word. “This is to show you that his work is to know and expose dark things to sinners, even as you see him standing there pleading with men. “And where you see the world behind him and the crown that hangs over his head, that’s to show you that he despises the things of this world for the love that he has for doing God’s work. He will surely receive his reward in glory.”
― John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress: A Readable Modern-Day Version of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress

“She had become a person who wanted only to achieve her goals—not because those goals would help others, but because of the goals themselves.”
― Brandon Sanderson, Rhythm of War

“what we call valorous niceness is often cowardly and sinful passivity in disguise.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Ignorance and ego, what a lethal combo.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“niceness stems from neutrality and weakness,”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“To get there, we have to kill mellow-yellow, docile, unemotional, Lotus-sitting Jesus, drinking kombucha and finding us little humans mildly amusing while trying to clear his head of conflict and division, “contemplating all,” as Tennyson put it.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Solomon, in Proverbs, states that “true love cares enough to confront” and that “better is open rebuke than hidden love” (27:5).”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Because Job loved and was honest with God, he was able to stay engaged in their relationship.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Too often we’re the bland leading the bland.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“I have seen evil and I know its ploy: to steal your personhood, your singular God-given identity.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“We shall then, for the first time, see everyone as he really was. There will be surprises.4”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Roman poet Ovid wrote: “Be patient and tough; some day this pain will be useful to you.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“A false dichotomy is considered a philosophical error, also called the “fallacy of the excluded middle,” and falls in the category of the “false dilemma.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“fear and shame don’t own him.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“We obtain and, even worse, boast about our identity by the things we consume (television, food) more than truth, goodness, and beauty, the three virtues that transcend time and borders. In America and elsewhere, I am because I consume, when it should be because God is and because I do.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Physical courage is the type involved in overcoming the fear of physical injury or death in order to save others or oneself. Moral courage entails maintaining ethical integrity or authenticity at the risk of losing friends, employment, privacy, or prestige. Psychological courage includes that sort required to confront a debilitating illness or destructive habit or situation; it is the bravery inherent in facing one’s inner demons.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“A strong will is one of the greatest predictors of success,” he said. “It’s not that it guarantees success, but the lack of a will does guarantee failure.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Most nice people know what is bad in this world, and they feel horrible for those who are wounded and broken. But they don’t have the guts to act in any meaningful way.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“In the Bible, nearly each time the virtue of courage appears (about twenty-five times), it is often in conjunction with the words strong or strength. The two are intertwined throughout the Bible and throughout society, so much so that the word courage in sign language is two clenched fists.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Courage without conscience,” wrote Robert Green Ingersoll, “is a wild beast.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“Absorb blows with equanimity. That’s what anthropologist David Gilmore says is at the heart of being male, and man, does that take courage. It means we defend others without giving into hatred, disdain, or contempt. And it means that we defend our own God-given value and importance without succumbing to an eye-for-an-eye or tooth-for-a-tooth. We don’t seek revenge even when we easily can.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“As courageous Christian men, we’re going to suffer. There’s no way around it, because suffering is choosing difficulty when you could escape it. To be male is to stand in gaps you could flee, but if you did, others would be more than hurt. They would be harmed. And when we become Gap People, a goal of Promise Keepers, we move away from nice and into the good.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“The battle is not the same as the quarrel.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“And we finally come to a more mature place in our faith and realize what Bonhoeffer knew: “Being a Christian is less about cautiously avoiding sin than about courageously and actively doing God’s will.” We”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“perfection is an earthly illusion and is used as an excuse not to complete workplace or kingdom-purpose projects. For many, it’s the fear of failure in disguise.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children

“If I still adhered to perfect work, I never would have written this imperfect book, which for the last decade or so has changed lives across the globe.”
― Paul Coughlin, No More Christian Nice Guy: When Being Nice--Instead of Good--Hurts Men, Women, and Children