Favourite quotations
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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.
Painting: the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic.
Outside every extrovert is an introvert trying to get in.
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.
Albert Einstein
If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.
Carl Sagan
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
Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime;
Therefore, we are saved by hope.
Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history;
Therefore, we are saved by faith.
Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone;
Therefore, we are saved by love.
No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own;
Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness.Reinhold Niebuhr
It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you can talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption such as you now meet, if at all, only in a nightmare. All day long we are, in some degree, helping each other to one or other of these destinations. It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilisations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendours.
CS Lewis The Weight of Glory
Man has held three views of his body. First there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the 'tomb' of the soul, and of Christians... to whom it was... a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones. Then there are the Neo-Pagans... to whom the body is glorious. But thirdly we have the view which St Francis expressed by calling his body 'Brother Ass'. ...
Ass is exquisitely right because no one in his senses can either revere or hate a donkey. It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly beautiful. So the body.CS Lewis The Four Loves, ch. 5
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, Tractate 29 (John 7:14-18)
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 The Problem of Pain
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