Mark Nenadov > Mark's Quotes

“She tangled her words
like matted fishing lines”
― Debbie Okun Hill, Tarnished Trophies

“Bear even served in the U.S. Military, teaching infantry soldiers how to blow up tanks— skills that come in handy during those daily scrum meetings.”
― Anonymous

“On Fifth Avenue I went into the Trump Tower, a new skyscraper. A guy named Donald Trump, a developer, is slowly taking over New York, building skyscrapers all over town with his name on them, so I went in and had a look around. The building had the most tasteless lobby I had ever seen --- all brass and chrome and blotchy red and white marble that looked like the sort of thing that if you saw it on the sidewalk you would walk around it. Here it was everywhere --- on the floors, up the walls , on the ceiling. It was like being inside somebody's stomach after he'd eaten pizza.”
― Bill Bryson

“For Kuyper, ideological hegemony was not merely irrational—it was blasphemous. For, Kuyper declared, whenever religious freedom is crushed, “God’s name” is “robbed of its splendor.”28”
― Matthew Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear

“I'm working on this book on the trial of Socrates. It started out with the idea of the problem of freedom of thought...and expression...I started by spending a year on the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions, and I had a fascinating time. And then I felt I couldn't understand the English Seventeenth Century Revolutions without understanding the Reformation. When I got to the Reformation, I felt that I had to understand the premonitory movements that began in the Middle Ages. When I got there, I felt I had to understand the classical period." (quoted in Andrew Patner, I. F. Stone: A Portrait, p. 21)”
― I. F. Stone

“Admitting that one’s life rested on some sort of faith was, in Kuyper’s mind, simply a matter of intellectual honesty. To deny faith’s role, to claim pure objectivity and rationality, was a “culpable blindfolding” of the self (Encyclopedia, 152). Moderns who declared that they could transcend the superstitions of faith and ground their thought “exclusively upon the action of the senses” were, according to Kuyper, “entirely mistaken, and allow themselves a leap to which they have no right” (Encyclopedia, 132). Every system of human thought pivoted on some deep fulcrum,”
― Matthew Kaemingk, Christian Hospitality and Muslim Immigration in an Age of Fear

“WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT this statement? “A backyard bird feeder will help take the stress out of your life.” A friend of mine uses that line to promote her birding shop in Barnegat, New Jersey. It’s warm, appealing, and will, with luck, help her turn a lot of people on to birding. However, with no offense to my friend, stress-free bird feeding falls into the same category as painless dentistry.”
― Lisa White, Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips from North America's Top Birders

“The difference between accomplished birders and beginning birders is that accomplished birders have misidentified thousands of birds and beginning birders relatively few.”
― Lisa White, Good Birders Don't Wear White: 50 Tips from North America's Top Birders

“To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward a destination of your dreams. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: “You have to wager. It is not up to you, you are already committed.”7 You can’t not bet your life on something. You can’t not be headed somewhere. We live leaning forward, bent on arriving at the place we long for.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our telos—our goal, our end. But the telos we live toward is not something that we primarily know or believe or think about; rather, our telos is what we want, what we long for, what we crave. It is less an ideal that we have ideas about and more a vision of “the good life” that we desire.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“To be human, we could say, is to desire the kingdom—some kingdom. To call it a “kingdom” is to signal that we’re not talking only about some personal, private Eden—some individual nirvana—but that we all live and long for a social vision of what we think society should look like too. That’s why there’s something ultimate about this vision: to be oriented toward some sense of the good life is to pursue some vision of how the world ought to be.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“if you are what you love and if love is a virtue, then love is a habit. This means that our most fundamental orientation to the world—the longings and desires that orient us toward some version of the good life—is shaped and configured by imitation and practice. This has important implications for how we approach Christian formation and discipleship.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“We learn to love, then, not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral. In this respect, ancient wisdom about spiritual disciplines intersects with contemporary psychological insight into consciousness. The result is a picture that should lead us to appreciate the significant role of the unconscious in action and behavior.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“Your love or desire—aimed at a vision of the good life that shapes how you see the world while also moving and motivating you—is operative on a largely nonconscious level. Your love is a kind of automaticity. That’s why we need to be aware of how it is acquired.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“Liturgy,” as I’m using the word, is a shorthand term for those rituals that are loaded with an ultimate Story about who we are and what we’re for. They carry within them a kind of ultimate orientation. To return to our metaphor above, think of these liturgies as calibration technologies: they bend the needle of our hearts.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“You can’t just think your way to new hungers. While Pollan and Berry may have successfully recruited my intellect, their books couldn’t change my habits. Such rehabituation was going to require a whole new set of practices. And while their arguments could be intellectual catalysts for me—epiphanies of insight into how my hunger-habits had been deformed—unlearning those habits would require counterformative practices, different rhythms and routines that would retrain my hunger. My hungers would have to be retrained so that I would want to eat differently.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“Instead of the bottom-up emphasis on worship as our expression of devotion and praise, historic Christian worship is rooted in the conviction that God is the primary actor or agent in the worship encounter. Worship works from the top down, you might say. In worship we don’t just come to show God our devotion and give him our praise; we are called to worship because in this encounter God (re)makes and molds us top-down.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“a virtue is a disposition that inclines us to achieve the good for which we are made.”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“there are no box seats at this table, no reservations for VIPs, no filet mignon for those who can afford it while the rest eat crumbs from their table. The Lord’s Table is a leveling reality in a world of increasing inequalities, an enacted vision of “a feast of rich food for all peoples, a banquet of aged wine” (Isa. 25:6).”
― James K.A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit

“If we want an educated population, a skilled workforce, an innovative society, then we will have to work just as hard as he did to persuade people that the pain of failure is like a blister in tennis—a sign that you are trying hard enough to improve.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“If you want to minimize the risk of catastrophe, you focus on the process much more than the outcome.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“groupidity”: doing something stupid because other people around you seem to think it’s safe.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Somehow, taking risks in groups makes us more, not less, likely to make dumb gambles that give us some remote hope of maintaining the status quo. We look around at all the other people strapped into their seats and say, “Never mind the smell of smoke.” While you’d hope that adding more people would make it more likely that someone would state the obvious, in truth, it often just gives our play-acting a larger and more convincing cast.”
― Megan McArdle, The Up Side of Down: Why Failing Well Is the Key to Success

“Pitchers need to be students, forever students,”
― David Cone, Full Count: The Education of a Pitcher

“‪The Eichmann trial taught the world the banality of evil. Nixon is teaching the world the evil of banality.”
― I. F. Stone

“Friendship should be more like a submarine, holding few and going deep. But we’ve made it more like a cruise ship, filled with lots of nice people whom we don’t know well at all.”
― Drew Hunter, Made for Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys

“Most of what we call friendship is little more than acquaintanceship. But acquaintanceship is to friendship what snorkeling is to deep-sea diving. Snorkeling is fine, but skimming along the surface isn’t exploring the deep.”
― Drew Hunter, Made for Friendship: The Relationship That Halves Our Sorrows and Doubles Our Joys

“I love the definition for image-bearers that Geerhardus Vos (1862–1949) gives, and I’ll be repeating it throughout the book: “That man bears God’s image means much more than that he is spirit and possesses understanding, will, etc. It means above all that he is disposed for communion with God, that all the capacities of his soul can act in a way that corresponds to their destiny only if they rest in God.”
― Pierce Taylor Hibbs, Struck Down but Not Destroyed: Living Faithfully with Anxiety

“What Ernest Hemmingway said of war we can say of anxiety: It burns the fat off our souls.”
― Pierce Taylor Hibbs, Struck Down but Not Destroyed: Living Faithfully with Anxiety