Patrick Oden > Patrick's Quotes

“If the children of Israel had heeded the Deuteronomic warnings, there would have been more milk and honey, and less misery and injustice, when they eventually crossed the Jordan.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“so many theological terms, words like ‘monotheism’ are late constructs, convenient shorthands for sentences with verbs in them, and that sentences with verbs in them are the real stuff of theology,”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“Monotheism and election, taken together, demand eschatology. Creational/covenantal monotheism, taken together with the tension between election and exile, demands resurrection and a new world.”
― N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God

“The church is always trying to get other people to reform; it might not be a bad idea to reform itself a little, by way of example. It is still clinging to one or two things which were useful once, but which are not useful now, neither are they ornamental.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“There is probably no pleasure equal to the pleasure of climbing a dangerous Alp; but it is a pleasure which is confined strictly to people who can find pleasure in it.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“Prophecy is a good line of business, but it is full of risks.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
― Mark Twain

“There is a Moral sense, and there is an Immoral Sense. History shows us that the Moral Sense enables us to perceive morality and how to avoid it, and that the Immoral Sense enables us to perceive immorality and how to enjoy it.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“In our own case--we are not afraid of dynamite till we get acquainted with it.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“Human pride is not worthwhile; there is always something lying in wait to take the wind out of it.”
― Mark Twain

“All diets are wholesome. Some are wholesomer than others, but all the ordinary diets are wholesome enough for the people who use them. Whether the food be fine or coarse it will taste good and it will nourish if a watch be kept upon the appetite and a little starvation introduced every time it weakens.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“I could never plan a thing and get it to come out the way I planned it. It came out some other way--some way I had not counted upon.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“Outside influences, outside circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left to himself, he wouldn't get regulated at all, and the sort of time he would keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches, with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and some men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a Waterbury.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“We have eaten theology with you, will you now eat theology with us?”
― Kwame Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience

“Without this vital contact with the spontaneous, grassroots theology, academic theology anywhere can become detached from the community of faith and so be not much more than an exclusive conversation carried on among the guild of scholars, and incapable of communicating life in Jesus Christ to others.”
― Kwame Bediako, Jesus and the Gospel in Africa: History and Experience

“Sometimes I feel like the sane person in a community of the mad; sometimes I feel like the one blind man where all others see; the one groping savage in the college of the learned, and always, during service, I feel like a heretic in heaven.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“The self-taught man seldom knows anything accurately, and he does not know a tenth as much as he could have known if he had worked under teachers; and, besides, he brags, and is the means of fooling other thoughtless people into going and doing as he himself has done.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“There are those who imagine that the unlucky accidents of life--life's "experiences"--are in some way useful to us. I wish I could find out how. I never knew one of them to happen twice. They always change off and swap around and catch you on your inexperienced side.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when THEY have the handling of it.”
― Mark Twain, The Complete Mark Twain Collection

“Jesus’ obedience did away with Adam's disobedience.”
― Michelle A. Gonzalez, Created in God's Image: An Introduction to Feminist Theological Anthropology

“The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first. Otherwise you will only see what you were expecting. Most scientists forget that.”
― Douglas Adams, The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“My judgment is that the rich undergo cruel trials and bitter tragedies of which the poor know nothing. In the first place I find that the rich suffer perpetually from money troubles. The poor sit snugly at home while sterling exchange falls ten points in a day. Do they care? Not a bit. An adverse balance of trade washes over the nation like a flood. Who have to mop it up? The rich. Call money rushes up to a hundred per cent, and the poor can still sit and laugh at a ten cent moving picture show and forget it. But the rich are troubled by money all the time.”
― Stephen Leacock, STEPHEN LEACOCK PREMIUM 12 BOOK HUMOUR COLLECTION + Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

“Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens's creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race—I say it in all seriousness—than Cardinal Newman's Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.”
― Stephen Leacock, STEPHEN LEACOCK PREMIUM 12 BOOK HUMOUR COLLECTION + Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

“To me, as a lover of Nature, the waving of a tree conveys thoughts which are never conveyed to me except by seeing a tree wave.”
― Stephen Leacock, STEPHEN LEACOCK PREMIUM 12 BOOK HUMOUR COLLECTION + Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town.

“The ‘popular Paul’ has all too often been addressing sixteenth-century questions in a nineteenth-century tone of voice,”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“But just because I would rather eat part of a dead cow than part of a dead rat, that doesn’t mean that I don’t care whether my steak is properly cooked;”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“once again, just because I prefer Guinness to lemonade that doesn’t mean I am not particular about the temperature at which the Guinness is served; and I believe Paul would have told Calvin to take his dark Irish beer out of the fridge, to let it come up to room temperature and taste its full flavour.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters

“Rereading some of these writers, one is tempted to say that if anyone needed help to struggle against some of the unfortunate things they committed to paper, it was not Paul, but some of his twentieth-century interpreters.”
― N.T. Wright, Paul and His Recent Interpreters