Unsorted Quotes, Devotional Bits, "Good 'uns," and Beloved Bible Passages

ad hoc witness and activity (e.g., "parachurch") that pays little attention to historical confessional definition. (Martin Marty)

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. (CS Lewis)

One mustn't make the Christian life into a punctilious system of law, like the Jewish [for] two reason: (1) It raises scruples when we don't keep the routine; and (2) It raises presumption when we do. Nothing gives one a more spuriously good conscience than keeping rules, even if there has been a total absence of all real charity and faith. (CS Lewis)

Avoid having your ego so close to your position that when your position falls, your ego goes with it. (Colin Powell)

I have enjoyed greatly the second blooming that comes when you finish the life of the emotions and of personal relations; and suddenly find — at the age of fifty, say — that a whole new life has opened before you, filled with things you can think about, study, or read about...It is as if a fresh sap of ideas and thoughts was rising in you. (Agatha Christie)

For both the seed and the soul, there is need for patience. Growth can seldom be forced in nature. Whether it is producing a tree or a human personality, nature unfolds its growth slowly, silently. (Morton Kelsey)

No matter how much pressure you feel at work, if you could find ways to relax for at least five minutes every hour, you'd be more productive. (Dr. Joyce Brothers)

No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often more) worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond. (CS Lewis)

Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. (Carl Jung)

Think of yourself just as a seed, waiting patiently in the earth — waiting to come up a flower in the Gardener's good time — up into the Real world, the Real waking. I suppose that all our present life, looked back on from there, will seem but a drowsy half-waking. We are here in the land of dreams. But cock-crow is coming. It is nearer now than when I began this letter. (CS Lewis)

I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. (Mother Teresa)

Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. (Thomas Carlyle)

I dont like generalisms such as 'the Germans' or 'the Americans.' I am of the opinion that there are no 'bad' peoples, only individuals or groups of individuals who can be either good or bad. Even 'bad' peoples have good things about them, and 'good' peoples have 'bad' things about them. The truth is never black and white. It is somewhere between. (Dr. Karl-Wolfgang Daum)

It is terrible to find how little progress one's philosophy and charity have made when they are brought to the test of domestic life. (CS Lewis)

Anyone can revolt. It is more difficult silently to obey our own inner promptings, and to spend our lives finding sincere and fitting means of expression for our temperament and our gifts. (Georges Rouault)

Marvelous Truth, confront us at every turn, in every guise. (Denise Levertov)

Dreams come true. Without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them. (John Updike)

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don't give up. (Anne Lamott)

Joy is not in things; it is in us. (Richard Wagner)

The highest courage is to dare to appear to be what one is. (John Lancaster Spalding)

(Two prayers for aging grace)

Hallow our lives.
Bring us home. (Carole Stoneking)

211. 
     Search others for their virtues, thyself for thy vices. (Benjamin Franklin)
     
212. 
     Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were. (Cherie Carter-Scott)
     
213. 
     A full cup must be carried steadily. (English Proverb)
     
214. 
     Christ did not teach and suffer that we might become, even in the natural loves, more careful of our own happiness. If a man is not uncalculating towards the earthly beloveds whom he has seen, he is none the more likely to be so towards God whom he has not. We shall draw neared to God, not by trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accpeting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armour. (CS Lewis)
     
215. 
     I myself do nothing. The Holy Spirit accomplishes all through me. (William Blake)
     
216. 
     One must be a wise reader to quote wisely and well. (Amos Bronson Alcott)
     
217. 
     Quotations are true levelers.
     They give, to all who will faithfully use them, the spiritual presence of the best and greatest of the human race.
     
218. 
     Never spend your money before you have it. (Thomas Jefferson)
     
219. 
     We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us. (Marcel Proust)
     
220. 
     Diplomacy is the art of knowing what not to say. (Matthew Trump)
     
221. 
     Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body. (Seneca)
     
222. 
     The challenge of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another. Everyone must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone. ... I will not be with you then, nor you with me. (Martin Luther)
     
223. 
     Joy is prayer.
     Joy is strength.
     Joy is love.
     Joy is a net of love by which you can catch souls. (Mother Teresa)
     
224. 
     Time is:
     Too slow for those who Wait,
     Too swift for those who Fear,
     Too long for those who Grieve;
     Too short for those who Rejoice;
     But for those who Love,
     Time is Eternity. (Henry Van Dyke)
     
225. 
     God, give me strength to face a fact though it slay me. (Thomas H. Huxley)
     
226. 
     Pleasure in the job put perfection in the work. (Aristotle)
     
227. 
     It's so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn't it? (L. M. Montgomery)
     
228. 
     He had occasional flashes of silence, that made his conversation perfectly delightful. (Sydney Smith, referring to Macaulay)
     
229. 
     Her grandmother, as she gets older, is not fading but rather becoming more concentrated. (Paulette Bates Alden)
     
230. 
     Good people are good because they've come to wisdom through failure. (William Saroyan)
     
231. 
     I see no sin committed but that I might have committed it. (Anonymous)
     
232. 
     Discretion in speech is more than eloquence. (Sir Francis Bacon)
     
233. 
     The best way to keep one's word is not to give it. (Napoleon Bonaparte)
     
234. 
     No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
     
235. 
     Creativity represents a miraculous coming together of the uninhibited energy of the child with its apparent opposite and enemy, the sense of order imposed on the disciplined adult intelligence. (Norman Podhoretz)
     
236. 
     Whenever you are asked if you can do a job, tell 'em, 'Certainly I can!' Then get busy and find out how to do it. (Theodore Roosevelt)
     
237. 
     If your morals make you dreary, depend on it , they are wrong. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
     
238. 
     When you want to believe in something, you also have to believe in everything that's necessary for believing in it. (Ugo Betti)
     
239. 
     The sweat of hard work is not to be displayed. It is much more graceful to appear favored by the gods. (Maxine Hong Kingston)
     
240. 
     It's easier to put on slippers than to carpet the whole world. (Al Franken)
     
241. 
     Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man...It is the comparison that makes you proud; the pleasure of being above the rest. (CS Lewis)
     
242. 
     You Can't Always Get What You Want, But If You Try, Sometimes You Find You Get What You Need. (Mick Jagger)
     
243. 
     Exeperience is what you get when you don't get what you want.
     
244. 
     While one person hesitates because he feels inferior, the other is busy making mistakes and becoming superior. (Henry C. Link)
     
245. 
     The defination of a rut is: a grave with both ends knocked out of it. (Anonymous)
     
246. 
     One thing life has taught me: if you are interested in anything, you never have to look for new interests. They come to you. When you are genuinely interested in one thing, it will always lead to something else. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
     
247. 
     If you punish out of love instead of anger, you'll never love it, and if you never love it, you'll avoid it whenever possible. (Andrew Peterson)
     
248. 
     I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he becomes a Christian, has the idea of an exam, or of a bargain in his mind. The first result of real Christianity is to blow that idea into bits. (CS Lewis)
     
249. 
     Old age ain't no place for sissies. (Bette Davis)
     
250. 
     If you can't be a good example, then you'll just have to be a horrible warning. (Catherine)
     
251. 
     I'm not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I'm not dumb ... and I'm also not blonde. (Dolly Parton)
     
252. 
     I have yet to hear a man ask for advice on how to combine marriage and a career. Gloria Steinem)
     
253. 
     Everyone there (heaven) is filled with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking a t the source from which it comes. (CS Lewis)
     
254. 
     Remember that what you believe will depend very much on what you are. (Noah Porter)
     
255. 
     Affection, as distinct from charity, is not a cause of lasting happiness. Left to its natural bent affection becomes in the end greedy, naggingly solicitous, jealous, exacting, timorous. (Lewis)
     
256. 
     An error is the more dangerous the more truth it contains. (Henri-Frédéric Amiel)
     
257. 
     There's nothing meaner than a Christian when he is mean. (J. Vernon McGee)
     
258. 
     This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the statues and there is a rumor around the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life. (CS Lewis)
     
259. 
     I never feel age.... If you have creative work, you don't have age or time. (Louise Nevelson)
     
260. 
     If you don't find quantum physics to be bewildering, you don't really understand quantum physics. (Niels Bohr)
     
261. 
     There are two equal and opposite errors into which can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. (CS Lewis)
     
262. 
     For you to be successful, sacrifices must be made. It's better that they are made by others but failing that, you'll have to make them yourself. (Rita Mae Brown)
     
263. 
     Anger is only one letter short of danger. (Anonymous)
     
264. 
     What we hope ever to do with ease we may learn first to do with diligence. (Samuel Johnson)
     
265. 
     A tough lesson in life that one has to learn is that not everybody wishes you well. (Dan Rather)
     
266. 
     Holding onto fear and other assorted emotional baggage is much like holding onto a 20 pound watermelon; you can't get close enough to someone to give them a good hug. (Po Bronson)
     
267. 
     I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions. (Lillian Hellman)
     
268. 
     There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there's never more than one. (CS Lewis)
     
269. 
     I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand. (Confucius)
     
270. 
     We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. (Joseph Campbell)
     
271. 
     The average teenager in America watches 21 to 29 hours of TV per week. The average [father] spends seven minutes a week with his kids. (Walt Larimore)
     
272. 
     When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. (CS Lewis)
     
273. 
     Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door. (Dr. Laura Schlessinger)
     
274. 
     Be fit for more than the thing you are now doing. Let every on know that you have a reserve in yourself; that you have more power than you are now using. If you are not too large for the place you occupy, you are too small for it. (James A. Garfield)
     
275. 
     A belief is something you will argue about. A conviction is something you will die for! (Howard Hendricks)
     
276. 
     I believe there are five measurements of spiritual growth: knowledge, perspective, conviction, skills, and character. These five levels of learning are the building blocks of spiritual maturity. (Rick Warren)
     
277. 
     Laughing is good exercise. It's like jogging on the inside. (Anonymous)
     
278. 
     It's a social and political system rooted in mavericks, innovation, risk-taking, open intellectual argument, impatience, creative change, failure, the frontier spirit, competition, and a compulsion to get ahead. (Daniel Henninger)
     
279. 
     I look at the world upside down, as God does. Instead of seeking out people who stroke my ego, I find those whose egos need stroking; instead of important people with resources who can do me favors, I find people with few resources; instead of the strong, I look for the weak; instead of the healthy, the sick. Is not this how God reconciles the world to himself? (Philip Yancey)
     
280. 
     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 a 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. (CS Lewis)
     
281. 
     I know God will not give me anything I can't handle. I just wish that He didn't trust me so much. (Mother Teresa)
     
282. 
     I can't give you a sure-fire formula for success, but I can give you a formula for failure: try to please everybody all the time. (Herbert Bayard Swope)
     
283. 
     They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness. (Louise Erdrich)
     
284. 
     How much easier it is to be critical than to be correct. (Benjamin Disraeli)
     
285. 
     And I say also this. I do not think the forest would be so bright, nor the water so warm, nor love so sweet, if there were no danger in the lakes. (CS Lewis — Out of the Silent Planet)
     
286. 
     Experience is a hard teacher because she gives the test first, the lesson afterwards. (Vernon Sanders Law)
     
287. 
     Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life. Aim above morality. Be not simply good; be good for something. (Henry David Thoreau)
     
288. 
     Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty. (Jefferson Davis)
     
289. 
     Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem. (Henry Kissinger)
     
290. 
     No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered ' by the time we reach home, but the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, and the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one's temper and give it up. It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us: it is the very sign of His presence. (CS Lewis)
     
291. 
     Get away from the crowd when you can. Keep yourself to yourself, if only for a few hours daily. (Arthur Brisbane)
     
292. 
     You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth. (Evan Esar)
     
293. 
     If you would not step into the harlot's house, do not go by the harlot's door. (Thomas Secker)
     
294. 
     One of the great difficulties is to keep before the audience's mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true but because it is good....You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. (CS Lewis)
     
295. 
     The reason quiet time is so difficult is because whenever we have a quiet time, the only person we have to deal with is ourselves. (Anonymous)
     
296. 
     Everyone seems normal until you get to know them. (Anonymous)
     
297. 
     If you add a little and do this often, soon that little will become great. (Hesiod)
     
298. 
     ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. (Voltaire)
     
299. 
     It is no profit to have learned well, if you neglect to do well. (Publilius Syrus)
     
300. 
     Does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment — even to death. If one had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy ... I imagine somebody will say, 'Well if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view?' All the difference in the world ... Remember, we Christians think man lives forever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must simply be killed. (CS Lewis)
     
301. 
     He who postpones the hour of living rightly is like the rustic who waits for the river to run out before he crosses. (Horace)
     
302. 
     Character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life — is the source from which self respect springs. (Joan Didion)
     
303. 
     Americans used to roar like lions for liberty. Now we bleat like sheep for security. (Norman Vincent Peale)
     
304. 
     Patriotism is not a short and frenzied outburst of emotion but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime. (Adlai E. Stevenson, Jr.)
     
305. 
     ...those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.... (Franklin)
     
306. 
     There is more truth said in jest than in truth. (Shakespeare)
     
307. 
     No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. (CS Lewis)
     
308. 
     Music is the wine that fills the cup of silence. (Robert Fripp)
     
309. 
     More and more clearly one sees how much of ones's philosophy and religion are mere talk: the boldest hope is that concealed somewhere within it there is some seed however small of the real thing. (CS Lewis)
     
310. 
     Life is tough, but it's tougher when you're stupid. (John Wayne)
     
311. 
     Always and never are two words you should always remember never to use. (Wendell Johnson)
     
312. 
     Blessed are those who can give without remembering and take without forgetting. (Elizabeth Bibesco)
     
313. 
     I never learned from a man who agreed with me. (Robert A. Heinlein)
     
314. 
     The ability to quote is a serviceable substitute for wit. (Somerset Maugham)
     
315. 
     The trouble with talking too fast is you may say something you haven't thought of yet. (Ann Landers)
     
316. 
     In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. (George Orwell)
     
317. 
     Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it. (Helen Keller)
     
318. 
     Anger is a signal, and one worth listening to. (Harriet Lerner)
     
319. 
     He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts — for support rather than for illumination. (Andrew Lang)
     
320. 
     To please God...to be a real ingredient in the divine happiness...to be loved by God, not merely pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son — it seems impossible, a weight or burden of glory which our thoughts can hardly sustain. But so it is. (CS Lewis)
     
321. 
     I don't sleep with married men, if you want to know. But I certainly have. I did a lot of stuff before I got sober that I wouldn't do anymore. But there wasn't a single thing that I'd do that Jesus would say, "Forget it, you're out. I've had it with you, try Buddha!"
     
322. 
     Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few. (Pythagoras)
     
323. 
     We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take us or spare us. (Marcel Proust)
     
324. 
     In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep. (Socrates)
     
325. 
     The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy. (Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
     
326. 
     No one ever gets far unless he accomplishes the impossible at least once a day. (Elbert Hubbard)
     
327. 
     Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows, we guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. (Agnes de Mile)
     
328. 
     There would be no society if living together depended upon understanding each other. (Eric Hoffer)
     
329. 
     You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough. (Mae West)
     
330. 
     If you would stand well with a great mind, leave him with a favorable impression of yourself; if with a little mind, leave him with a favorable impression of himself. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
     
331. 
     Remember when you talk you only repeat what you already know, but if you listen you may learn something. (Amish saying)
     
332. 
     A person who lives for himself never knows the real joys of life. (Amish saying)
     
333. 
     You are not here merely to make a living. You are here to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, and with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world. You impoverish yourself if you forget this errand. (Woodrow Wilson)
     
334. 
     A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millenia — which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains as such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes — if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. (CS Lewis)
     
335. 
     An optimist is the human personification of spring. (Susan J. Bissonette)
     
336. 
     There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers. (Richard Feynman)