Brian > Brian's Quotes

“A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did. Yet I had not exactly spent the journey in thought. Nor in great emotion. “Emotional” is perhaps the last word we can apply to some of the most important events. It was more like when a man, after a long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelle intrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused by wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and His compulsion is our liberation.”
― C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

“Before we can progress in providing answers . . . we have to repent of our questions.”
― Peter Leithart

“This is the most dangerous trial of all, when there is no trial and every thing goes well; for then a man is tempted to forget God, to become too bold and to misuse times of prosperity.”
― Martin Luther, A Treatise on Good Works

“There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

“A despot doesn't fear eloquent writers preaching freedom-he fears a drunken poet may crack a joke that will take hold.”
― E.B. White

“the sweet heavy smell grew very much less. For though the whole fire had not been put out, a good bit of it had, and what remained smelled very largely of burnt Marsh-wiggle, which is not at all an enchanting smell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

“Aravis also had many quarrels (and, I'm afraid even fights) with Cor, but they always made it up again: so that years later, when they were grown up they were so used to quarreling and making it up again that they got married so as to go on doing it more conveniently.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“In Charn [Jadis] had taken no notice of Polly (till the very end) because Digory was the one she wanted to make use of. Now that she had Uncle Andrew, she took no notice of Digory. I expect most witches are like that. They are not interested in things or people unless they can use them; they are terribly practical.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

“If you have ever seen a dragon in a pinch, you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit, even to Old Took's great-grand-uncle Bullroarer, who was so huge (for a hobbit) that he could ride a horse. He charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club. It sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“You've no idea how good an old joke sounds when you take it out again after a rest of five or six hundred years.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle

“So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.”
― William Shakespeare, Richard II

“[Mani] deleted as interpolations all texts in the New Testament that assumed either the order and goodness of matter or the inspiration and authority of the Old Testament. Otherwise he thought his expurgated New Testament a sound book.”
― Henry Chadwick, Augustine: A Very Short Introduction

“As far as sacred Scripture is concerned, however much froward men try to gnaw at it, nevertheless it clearly is crammed with thoughts that could not be humanly conceived. Let each of the prophets be looked into: none will be found who does not far exceed human measure. Consequently, those for whom prophetic doctrine is tasteless ought to be thought of as lacking taste buds.”
― John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 Vols

“The new covenant radically alters the Sabbath perspective. The current believer does not first labor six days, looking hopefully towards rest. Instead, he begins the week by rejoicing in the rest already accomplished by the cosmic event of Christ's resurrection. Then he enters joyfully into his six days of labor, confident of success through the victory which Christ has already won.”
― O. Palmer Robertson, The Christ Of The Covenants

“A walk through an old graveyard shows our ancestors often had more dead children than we have live ones.”
― P.J. O'Rourke, All the Trouble in the World

“They became desperate for an antidote, such as coziness & color. They tried to bury the obligatory white sofas under Thai-silk throw pillows of every rebellious, iridescent shade of Magenta, pink, and tropical green imaginable. But the architect returned, as he always does, like the conscience of a Calvinist, and he lectured them and hectored them and chucked the shimmering little sweet things out.”
― Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

“it was a duel in which two participants got up at crack of dawn, one armed with a rapier, the other with a blunderbuss, where shaking of fists and mutterings usurped the place of battle, and which ended with the two antagonists going their separate ways, undamaged but shaken, and with a frustrating sense of honor ruffled but unsatisfied.”
― E. Gordon Rupp, Luther and Erasmus: Free Will and Salvation

“I am the fool in this story, and no rebel shall hurl me from my throne.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“God picks us up where we are, not where we should have been”
― Douglas Wilson, Reforming Marriage: Gospel Living for Couples

“This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well which thou must leave ere long.”
― William Harmon, The Classic Hundred Poems

“What is sanctification? Sanctification is the work of God's free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and live unto righteousness.”
― Westminster Assembly, Westminster Confession of Faith, Larger & Shorter Catechisms, Sum of Saving Knowledge

“But [Pooh] couldn't sleep. The more he tried to sleep the more he couldn't. He tried counting Sheep, which is sometimes a good way of getting to sleep, and, as that was no good, he tried counting Heffalumps. And that was worse. Because every Heffalump that he counted was making straight for a pot of Pooh's honey, and eating it all. For some minutes he lay there miserably, but when the five hundred and eighty-seventh Heffalump was licking its jaws, and saying to itself, "Very good honey this, I don't know when I've tasted better," Pooh could bear it no longer.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“There must be somebody there, because somebody must have said "Nobody.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“That was Thorin's style. He was an important dwarf. If he had been allowed, he would probably have gone on like this until he was out of breath, without telling anyone there anything that was not known already. But he was rudely interrupted.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again

“We teach them not to notice the different sense of the possessive pronoun .. . Even in the nursery a child can be taught to mean by "my Teddy-bear" not the old imagined recipient of affection to whom it stands in a special relation (for that is what the Enemy will teach them to mean if we are not careful) but "the bear I can pull to pieces if I like.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“All is summed up in the prayer which a young female human is said to have uttered recently: "O God, make me a normal twentieth-century girl!" Thanks to our labors, this will mean increasingly: "Make me a minx, a moron, and a parasite.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters