Favourite quotations
If modernism was burning the old house down, then postmodernism is playing with the charred remains.
Unknown
Art is not what you see, but what you make others see.
Edgar Degas
Painting: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Ambrose Bierce
Outside every extrovert is an introvert trying to get in.
Theologians think they know the questions but cannot understand the answers, Physicists think they know the answers but cannot understand the questions.
John D. Barrow Theories of Everything: The Quest for the Ultimate Explanation, p.1
If our brains were simple enough for us to understand them, we'd be so simple that we couldn't.
Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, p.8
Consciousness is like a circus ringmaster - he acts as if he is in charge of all the confusion, even though he is not.
Jack Cohen & Ian Stewart The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a Complex World, p. 176
Hoffstadter's Law: Things never act exactly as you expect, even when you take into account Hoffstadter's Law.
Douglas Hoffstadter Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid"
To see through everything would leave us seeing nothing at all.
John D. Barrow Theories of Everything: The Quest for the Ultimate Explanation, p. 210
Heisenberg may have been here.
Anon. graffiti
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don't.
Unknown
In business there are three factors: speed, cost, and quality. At best, you can only get 2 out of 3.
Unknown
Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore, seek not to understand that you may believe, but believe that you may understand.
St Augustine On the Gospel of St John XXIX
Grace means there is nothing we can do to make God love us more ... And ... there is nothing we can do to make God love us less.
Philip Yancey What's so amazing about grace?, ch. 5 (p.70)
He who cannot forgive another breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.
George Herbert, quoted in Philip Yancey What's so amazing about grace?, before ch. 7 (p.82)
There are no final proofs for the existence of God. There are only witnesses.
Rabbi Heschel (1966) - Quoted by Philip Yancey, Hope for Abraham's Sons, Christianity Today, 27 Oct 2004 [www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2004/011/18.120.html]
Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
C.S. Lewis
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
C.S. Lewis Mere Christianity, Book II ch. 1
Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.
C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain, ch. 10
Myth is ... a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination.
C.S. Lewis Miracles, ch. 15
Good, as it ripens, becomes continually more different not only from evil but from other good.
C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce, Preface
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. To those who knock it is opened.
C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce, ch. 9
We know much more about heaven than hell, for heaven is the home of humanity and therefore contains all that is implied in a glorified human life; but hell was not made for men. It is no sense parallel to heaven; it is the darkness outside"
C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain, ch. 8
[T]he doors of Hell are locked on the inside. ... [Its inhabitants] enjoy forever the horrible freedom they have demanded, and are therefore self-enslaved: just as the blessed, forever submitting to obedience, become through all eternity more and more free.
C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain, ch. 8
It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
C.S. Lewis The Problem of Pain