Stan > Stan's Quotes

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Is there something in your spirit that keeps telling you it should be different: more interesting, more engaging, more creative, more profound? Does your prayer life feel like you're eating the same food over and over every day - mixing the same ingredients but hoping for a new, more enticing dish?”
― David Brazzeal, Pray Like a Gourmet: Creative Ways to Feed Your Soul

“But God's Word, the Word that says he is our Father, the Word that has been calling out to us men from the first day of creation: "You are mine!" - this Word endures through all the eclipses of history, it sounds above the hoofbeats of the apocalyptic horsemen, and it will still be the saving Word on God's great last day of reckoning when the Judge will come to us and, suddenly, he will turn out to be our Father.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“So this is the law that always operates in the life of the Christian man: The longer he lives in Christ's discipleship the greater grows his poverty and indebtedness. But the riches and abundance of his Lord also grow greater and greater and make up for all he lacks. He must decrease, but his Lord must increase. And this he does far more abundantly than all that we ask or think.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Madeleine L'Engle Herself: Reflections on a Writing Life

“We must always compose ourselves and lay everything else aside when we begin to pray. The world, with its other gods and all its many cares and consuming desires, has become our home, and the region of prayer has become a strange and alien country. That is why it is often so hard for us to make the transition from our world to the realm of prayer. We are filled with cares, we are distracted and driven about by doubts and restraints. We stand at the bottom of the stairs, crying out from a long distance.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“If there are any among us who are at their wit’s end, they ought to try for once to put aside all their grievances and perhaps even all their petitions and simply praise God, in order to turn their hearts to the end of the ways of God, where the eternal liturgy resounds in heaven. Nothing so changes us—precisely in the darkest moments of life—as the praise of God.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“We can praise a man only when we have seen what he accomplishes. But we must praise God in order to see what he accomplishes. And therefore we should praise him at the very moments in life when there seems to be no way out. Then we shall learn to see the way out for our own lives, simply because God is there at the end of every way and every blind alley.”
― Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord's prayer

“For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much—the wheel, New York, wars and so on—whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man—for precisely the same reasons.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“Moreover, one should so respect a friend's presence that he dare not perform anything shameful or speak any unbecoming word, since any fault so reflects on a friend that the friend not only blushes and grieves inwardly but also reproaches himself with what he sees or hears, as if he had committed the sin himself.”
― Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship

“One-day-at-a-time rationalism risks restricting its analysis to the immediate implications of each issue as it arises, missing the wider implications of a decision that may have merit as regards the issue immediately at hand, considered in isolation, but which can be disastrous in terms of the ignored longer-term repercussions.”
― Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Society

“...they are able to forgive themselves, as a wise man once said, for being human. That is knowing that life is hard and virtue rare, they keep the ancient faith that it is better to love than to hate, to live fully even if imperfectly.”
― Charles Van Doren, A History of Knowledge: Past, Present, and Future