Daniel > Daniel's Quotes

“There Lancelot, low and softly to himself singing, the sun greeted, 215 life from darkness lifted shining in the dome of heaven by death exalted. Ever times would change and tides alter, and o’er hills of morning hope come striding to awake the weary, while the world lasted.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fall of Arthur

“Brandon is just the kind of man,” said Willoughby one day, when they were talking of him together, “whom every body speaks well of, and nobody cares about; whom all are delighted to see, and nobody remembers to talk to.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“Elinor agreed to it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition.”
― Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility

“The human mind is generally far more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define. It wants to make every distinction a distinction of value; hence those fatal critics who can never point out the differing quality of two poets without putting them in an order of preference as if they were candidates for a prize.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“It would be hard to find any legitimate point of view from which this feeling could be condemned. As the family offers us the first step beyond self-love, so this offers us the first step beyond family selfishness. Of course it is not pure charity; it involves love of our neighbours in the local, not of our Neighbour, in the Dominical, sense. But those who do not love the fellow-villagers or fellow-townsmen whom they have seen are not likely to have got very far towards loving ‘Man’ whom they have not. All natural affections, including this, can become rivals to spiritual love: but they can also be preparatory imitations of it, training (so to speak) of the spiritual muscles which Grace may later put to a higher service; as women nurse dolls in childhood and later nurse children.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Patriotism has then, many faces. Those who would reject it entirely do not seem to have considered what will certainly step—has already begun to step—into its place. For a long time yet, or perhaps forever, nations will live in danger. Rulers must somehow nerve their subjects to defend them or at least to prepare for their defence. Where the sentiment of patriotism has been destroyed this can be done only by presenting every international conflict in a purely ethical light. If people will spend neither sweat nor blood for ‘their country’ they must be made to feel that they are spending them for justice, or civilisation, or humanity. This is a step down, not up. Patriotic sentiment did not of course need to disregard ethics. Good men needed to be convinced that their country’s cause was just; but it was still their country’s cause, not the cause of justice as such. The difference seems to me important. I may without self-righteousness or hypocrisy think it just to defend my house by force against a burglar; but if I start pretending that I blacked his eye purely on moral grounds—wholly indifferent to the fact that the house in question was mine—I become insufferable. The pretence that when England’s cause is just we are on England’s side—as some neutral Don Quixote might be—for that reason alone, is equally spurious. And nonsense draws evil after it. If our country’s cause is the cause of God, wars must be wars of annihilation. A false transcendence is given to things which are very much of this world.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“A belief in invisible cats cannot perhaps be logically disproved, but it tells us a good deal about those who hold it. Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing—or should we say ‘seeing’? there are no tenses in God—the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath’s sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a ‘host’ who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and ‘take advantage of’ Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“I labored sedulously and anxiously about the sense of Rom. 1:17, where St. Paul says that the righteousness of God is revealed in the Gospel. There I long sought and knocked; for the words “righteousness of God” were in my way, which was usually explained as meaning a virtue in God according to which He is just in Himself and condemns sinners. Thus all the doctors had explained it, Augustine alone excepted, saying that the righteousness of God is the wrath of God. But as often as I read this passage I wished that God had never revealed the Gospel. For who is able to love a God that is angry, judges, and condemns? Finally, by the enlightenment of the Holy Spirit I more diligently pondered the words of the Prophet Habakkuk, chap, 2, verse 4, where he says: ‘The just shall live by faith.’ From this I gathered that life must come from faith, and so referred the abstract to the concrete. Thus the whole Scriptures were opened to me, and the whole heavens also.” (On Gen. 27:38, Erl. Lat, 7:74.)”
― Martin Luther quoted by Matthias Loy

“If our meditation on the cross be meagre, can our love for the Saviour be great?”
― Frederick S Leahy

“He grieved for me, who had no cause of grief for himself; and, laying aside the delights of His eternal Godhead, he experiences the affliction of my weakness”
― Ambrose

“Its use is threefold. It serves the purpose of restraining the wickedness of men and preserving order. It serves as a rule of holy living to the regenerate. It serves to show people their sins and reveal the wrath of God against them, and thus, indirectly, to lead souls to Christ, by disclosing to them their helplessness and ruin without Him”
― Matthias Loy

“Gethsemane is not a place for hurried theological tourism: it is where the believer must linger, watch, and pray.”
― Frederick S Leahy

“Bishop Ryle well says of Christ's experience in Gethsemane, 'it is a depth which we have no line to fathom'.
For one fleeting moment immense joy must have leaped within Christ's soul as the Father's hand touched him. This was a message from home. Heaven was behind him. He was forsaken, but not disowned. His Father was there, somewhere in the darkness. His loud cries and tears had not been unnoticed.”
― Frederick S. Leahy, The Cross He Bore: Meditations on the Sufferings of the Redeemer

“Herein he gives us holy communion with himself. The soul knows his voice when he speaks, Nec hominem sonat.4 There is something too great in it to be the effect of a created power. When the Lord Jesus Christ at one word stilled the raging of the sea and wind, all that were with him knew there was divine power at hand (Matt. 8:25–27). And when the Holy Ghost by one word stills the tumults and storms that are raised in the soul, giving it an immediate calm and security, it knows his divine power, and rejoices in his presence.”
― John Owen, Communion with the Triune God

“As a means of retaining communion with God, whereby we sweetly ease our hearts in the bosom of the Father, and receive in refreshing tastes of his love. The soul is never more raised with the love of God than when by the Spirit taken into intimate communion with him in the discharge of this duty; and therein it belongs to the Spirit of consolation, to the Spirit promised as a comforter.”
― John Owen, Communion with the Triune God

“High-hearted son of Tydeus, why ask about my birth?
Like the generations of leaves, the lives of mortal men.
Now the wind scatters the old leaves across the earth,
now the living timber bursts with the new buds
and spring comes round again. And so with men:
as one generation comes to life, another dies away.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“As long as he (e.g. a shoemaker or a blacksmith) clings to these two, to the Word of faith toward God by which the heart is made clean, and to the word of understanding which teaches him how to act toward his neighbor in his station in life, everything is clean to him, even if with his hands and his whole body he deals with nothing but dirt.”
― Gene Edward Veith Jr., Spirituality of the Cross Revised Edition: The Way of the First Evangelicals

“But a man’s life breath cannot come back again—
no raiders in force, no trading brings it back,
once it slips through a man’s clenched teeth. Mother tells me,
the immortal goddess Thetis with her glistening feet,
that two fates bear me on to the day of death.
If I hold out here and I lay siege to Troy,
my journey home is gone, but my glory never dies.
If I voyage back to the fatherland I love,
my pride, my glory dies . . .
true, but the life that’s left me will be long,
the stroke of death will not come on me quickly.”
― Homer, The Iliad

“Therefore, if you encounter someone with a worthless tongue who gossips and slanders someone else, rebuke such people straight to their faces and make them blush with shame. Then those who otherwise would bring some poor person into disgrace, from which one could scarcely clear one’s self, will hold their tongue. For honor and good name are easily taken away but not easily restored.”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“The righteousness over against this [actual sin] is actual, flowing from faith and essential [or alien] righteousness.”[53] Thus the third kind of righteousness has its source in the second kind of righteousness and describes the believer’s growth in holiness: “Because that third righteousness is sought for nothing other than that original sin be overcome and the body of sin be destroyed.”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“This is the case even among those considered to be conservative and evangelical thinkers. Stanley Grenz once asserted, “In this manner the Christian vision of God as the social Trinity and our creation to be the imago Dei provides the transcendent basis for the human ethical ideal as life-in-community. Consequently the reciprocal, perichoretic dynamic of the Triune God is the cosmic reference point for the idea of society itself.”[5] But the obscurity and debate that continue to surround the imago Dei or “image of God” hardly serve as conclusive proof that God intends the divine reality and being somehow to be normative for humanity. Mercifully, not all theologians have adopted this misuse of the trinitarian reality. Richard Bauckham quite rightly observes that “true human community comes about not as an image of the Trinitarian fellowship, but as the Spirit makes us like Jesus in his community with the Father and with others.”[6] The hard fact is that neither Scripture nor the Lutheran Confessions ever offer the mystery of the trinitarian Godhead as the model or even a model for Christian living or the shape of Christian life. As the saying goes, “God is God, and you’re not.”[7] The Christian life is shaped not by God’s trinitarian nature as model, but by God’s revealed word and work in us.[8]”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“Also central to Luther’s ‘evangelical breakthrough,’” Kolb writes, “was his discovery of what makes the human creature ‘righteous’ or right, that is, truly human.”[18] To be righteous is to be all that one was intended and designed to be. Thus fulfillment of humanity takes place on two planes: passively before God, and actively before humans. Kolb puts it this way: “Luther realized, however, that what made him genuinely right in God’s sight had to be distinguished from what made him truly human—genuinely right—in relationship to other creatures of God.”
― Joel D. Biermann, A Case for Character: Towards a Lutheran Virtue Ethics

“Of course, there are people who deny that such obvious differences are real – Marxists, anarchists, radical feminists, and other denizens of the intellectual slums, who mistake an inability to make the simplest conceptual distinctions for deep insight. To these, it seems, we can add the ranks of secularist “thinkers.” When “New Atheists” and their ilk assure us in all seriousness that believing in God is just like believing in the Easter bunny, or that teaching religion is tantamount to child abuse, they remind me of the freshman philosophy student who once proudly declared to me his “discovery” that taking a girl out on a date was really no different from hiring a call girl, since what it’s “all about” is giving something in exchange for sex. In both cases, the analysis put forward is evidence not of profound philosophical understanding, but merely of being a shallow and sophomoric jackass.”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“The opinion of the majority was in his view not what mattered; rather, it was the opinion of the wise, those guided by reason, that counted. When put on trial by a jury of 500 of his fellow citizens for purportedly denying the gods of the city and replacing them with new ones, and in general corrupting the youth – the real motive may have been his associations with certain anti-democratic political figures of the day – he defended himself, Plato tells us, by claiming that he was divinely called to lead others to the improvement of their souls. Naturally, this democratic assembly had him executed. (Today they’d probably just denounce him as a “neo-con” or part of the “religious right” and haul him off for multicultural sensitivity training.)”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“The cause of civil liberty and civil government gains as little as that of religion by this confusion of duties. Those who quit their proper character to assume what does not belong to them are, for the greater part, ignorant both of the character they leave and of the character they assume. Wholly unacquainted with the world, in which they are so fond of meddling, and inexperienced in all its affairs, on which they pronounce with so much confidence, they have nothing of politics but the passions they excite. Surely the church is a place where one day’s truce ought to be allowed to the dissensions and animosities of mankind.”
― Edmund Burke, Collected Works of Edmund Burke

“And needless to say, smugness is half the fun of being a liberal (the other half being the tearing down of everything one’s ancestors, and one’s betters generally, worked so hard to build).”
― Edward Feser, The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism

“Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind; the alliance, therefore, of these writers with the moneyed interest23 had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood”
― Edmund Burke, Collected Works of Edmund Burke

“The new covenant is made with them alone who effectually and eventually are made partakers of the grace of it. “This is the covenant that I will make with them… I will be merciful to their unrighteousness,” etc. Those with whom the old covenant was made were all of them actual partakers of the benefits of it; and if they are not so with whom the new is made, it comes short of the old in efficacy, and may be utterly frustrated. Neither does the indefinite proposal of the terms of the covenant prove that the covenant is made with them, or any of them, who enjoy not the benefits of it. Indeed this is the excellence of this covenant, and so it is here declared, that it does effectually communicate all the grace and mercy contained in it to all and every one with whom it is made; with whomsoever it is made, his sins are pardoned.”
― Pascal Denault, The Distinctiveness of Baptist Covenant Theology: A Comparison Between Seventeenth-Century Particular Baptist and Paedobaptist Federalism

“us, and not only was put to death, but also after this intercedes for us?”
― Michael S. Horton, Justification, Volume 1