Matt Harmless > Matt's Quotes

“I feel thin, sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“It is not despair, for despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt. We do not.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“But it does not seem that I can trust anyone,' said Frodo.
Sam looked at him unhappily. 'It all depends on what you want,' put in Merry. 'You can trust us to stick with you through thick and thin--to the bitter end. And you can trust us to keep any secret of yours--closer than you keep it yourself. But you cannot trust us to let you face trouble alone, and go off without a word. We are your friends, Frodo.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“My dear Frodo!’ exclaimed Gandalf. ‘Hobbits really are amazing creatures, as I have said before. You can learn all that there is to know about their ways in a month, and yet after a hundred years they can still surprise you at a pinch.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I wish it need not have happened in my time," said Frodo.
"So do I," said Gandalf, "and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Love and trust, in the space between what’s said and what’s heard in our life, can make all the difference in the world. ”
― Fred Rogers (Mr. Rogers)

“Awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“Patriarchy is inevitable. God has built it into the fabric of the cosmos. It is part of the divine created order. You could as soon smash it as you could smash gravity. It is natural and irrevocable. Cicero was right: “Custom will never conquer nature; for it is always invincible.”1 Men were made to rule. They always have and always will. Nothing can change that. Nothing will. It is not a question of whether men will be ruling, but which ones and how. This is what patriarchy is: the natural rulership of men. The term comes from Greek and means simply “father rule.”
― Michael Foster, It's Good to Be a Man: A Handbook for Godly Masculinity

“As wonderful as a personal relationship with Jesus is, the people that show the most enthusiasm for it do not give much thought to all the things that have to be in place in order for it to be possible. Take the Bible, for instance, or the sacraments, or the creeds, or even prayer. All of these things must be in place before you can even imagine having a personal relationship with Jesus. Without archivists, and translators, and publishers, we wouldn’t have Bibles that tell us about Jesus. Then there are Church councils that gave us the creeds which summarize what the Bible says about Jesus and His divine nature. And this is just a start. Even beyond those things, just consider all the ways that the Christian religion has influenced Western civilization for the good. Think about how the arts, the sciences, and our laws, customs, and holidays wouldn’t even exist in their current forms without the Christian religion. No, you cannot reduce Christianity to a relationship; it is bigger than that. Religion really is a better word than relationship for describing what it is.”
― C.R. Wiley, The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family

“When it comes to piety something along this line had already happened by the time the preachers of my youth commended it to me. I hate to say it, but even the piety of Wesley and Whitfield was a downgrade of the real thing.3 This is because by the eighteenth-century piety’s sphere had already contracted. It is a well-documented story, so I won’t go into detail, but I think I can sum it up succinctly. By the time of Wesley and Whitfield, what had once been regarded as public truth had been reduced to private convictions. Authority in general had eroded due to revolutions in politics, the sciences, and even economics. To meet the challenge evangelists were forced to stress direct, very personal experience of the supernatural by everyone. The second-hand Truth contained in catechisms and confessions was no longer enough. Even eyewitness accounts of the risen Christ were not as trustworthy as a “warmed heart.” This is how we ended up with a hymn like “I Serve a Risen Savior.” In that song the line that is supposed to persuade you to believe that Jesus rose from the dead is, “You ask me how I know He lives? He lives within my heart!”4 What we are left with today is heart religion, because now the heart is the only place Jesus can be publicly acknowledged to live. Ironically, many people think that this is the sum total of Christianity, and the notion that this is actually a downgrading of the faith is inconceivable.”
― C.R. Wiley, The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family

“You may wonder how your small stake could possibly threaten the powers that be. Just remember, a household ordered by the household code in Ephesians reflects the rule of Christ. Besides that, all things connect. That little tune that your household sings is in harmony with the music of the spheres, and that harmony restores many things that the enemy has perverted.”
― C.R. Wiley, The Household and the War for the Cosmos: Recovering a Christian Vision for the Family

“the whole life of man is essentially religious; and politics, the sphere of just relations between men, especially become religious when conducted in a Christian spirit. Nothing can be more fatal to mankind or to religion itself than to call one set of things or persons religious and another secular, when Christ has redeemed the whole.”
― Stephen Wolfe, The Case for Christian Nationalism

“For me, reason is the natural organ of truth; but imagination is the organ of meaning. Imagination, producing new metaphors or revivifying old, is not the cause of truth, but its condition.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Without mothers, as opposed to “birthing individuals,” you do not have a civilization. Without mothers nurturing their children, no families, no households can exist. Women, not men, were given wombs to carry children. Women, not men, were given breasts to feed children. Women were designed to be the anchor of their households and the bringers and nurturers of life. One must do violence to the glorious image of God that they bear in order to make them wombless, breastless, pathetic and miserable imitations of men. Until we are willing to admit that feminism, even (especially!) the feminism accepted by conservatives, is a demon goddess responsible for our enslavement, we will remain under the shade of the oaken shrines of Trashworld.”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in High School to teaching Remedial English in college.
Joseph Sobran”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“Because we treat the first two-thirds of the Bible as historical appendices, we miss all that the Bible has to offer about worship.”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“In fact, before the Second Great Awakening, traditional liturgies throughout all of the church in all the world—Eastern, Western, Catholic, and Protestant—followed a more or less similar pattern and structure as the Hebrews followed when they drew near in Leviticus. Our ancestors did not mindlessly follow some dead tradition of men before revivalistic evangelicalism sprang up in the 1820s and ’30s, allowing us now to have Hillsong music, smoke machines, and laser lights.”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“The job of the reformer is to grab hold of our figuratively trans-ed society’s XY chromosomes and not let go. No matter how much people have been memed and psyopsed into believing they are introverts and conditioned to practice antisocial behaviors, people want to love and be loved. Men and women were designed to not be alone. No one wants to feel like nobody cares about them. Knowing this is a weapon against globohomo; a weapon that you personally can wield powerfully against this hideous, decrepit world.”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“This is why the idea of having children has been intentionally socially engineered out of people. The natural impulse to produce offspring has been carefully and deliberately severed from sexual desire, all the cultural and social mores governing sex that funneled the young toward family formation have been demolished. This is why a life of perpetual adolescence is glorified. All of our young people have been psyopsed into adopting the fruitless, nihilistic, and consumeristic lifestyle of the homosexual, whether or not their hearts have been groomed into those particular sexual perversions. The intentionally childless, consumerist, permanent adolescent is gay, whether he sexually desires his same sex or not. It is important for us to be aware that this has been programmed into the hearts of the young, so that we can teach our children to hate it. It is simply not enough to keep your kids from watching movies or having access to the internet when they are in your home. No matter what you do, the magical dark liturgy that runs twenty-four seven will still be out there, and the likelihood that your children will have FOMO (fear of missing out) will be high. But teaching your children to hate it is far more important than keeping it hidden away from them. They should learn specifically why they ought to despise everything from Trashworld. In your house they should mature to recognize that the glories of this disgusting world of ugliness are nothing but hideous monstrosities.”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“A group of ten to twelve men, who would die for one another is a thing that is more powerful than an entire division of conscripts.”
― Andrew Isker, The Boniface Option: A Strategy For Christian Counteroffensive in a Post-Christian Nation

“Marriage is not simply a ratification of an existing love. It is the conversion of that love into a biological and social continuity.”
― George Gilder, Men and Marriage

“A society does not run into real trouble, however, until its culture begins to adopt the unmarried male pattern, until the long-term commitments on which any enduring community is based are undermined by an opportunistic public philosophy. The public philosophy of the unmarried male focuses on immediate gratification: “What did posterity ever do for me?” A society that widely adopts this attitude is in trouble.”
― George Gilder, Men and Marriage

“I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
― Martin Luther

“It is not a new phenomenon for false religion to prevail during times of great revival of true religion, with many hypocrites arising among true believers. This pattern can be seen in the great reformation and revival during Josiah's time, the outpouring of the Spirit upon the Jews in the days of John the Baptist, and the great commotions caused by Jesus Christ's preaching. In each of these instances, many were called, but few were chosen; many were temporarily roused and affected, but few were true disciples who endured to the end.”
― Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections: In Modern, Updated English

“I advise no one to place his child where the Scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the word of God must become corrupt.... I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth.” —MARTIN LUTHER”
― Douglas Wilson, Excused Absence: Should Christian Kids Leave Public Schools?