Barbara Beck > Barbara's Quotes

“… the world will indulge you just so long Asher Lev. Then it will stop. You will simply have to grow accustomed to that truth.”
― Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev

“So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”
― George Orwell, Why I Write

“There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails. It tells you to do the straight thing and it does not seem to care how painful, or dangerous, or difficult it is to do.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so. ”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Human beings are very unbalanced and prone to go off on tangents. In every area of life- with too great emphasis on one thing, leaving out another important thing altogether. None of us will ever be perfectly balanced in our spiritual lives, our intellectual lives, our emotional lives, our family lives, in relationships with other human beings, or in our business lives. BUT WE ARE CHALLENGED TO TRY, WITH THE HELP OF GOD. We are meant to live in the scriptures.”
― Edith Schaeffer, What is a Family?

“I cannot understand the almost exclusive emphasis on racial integration, when in fact we are getting more and more segregated into tight little cliques on age grounds.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!”
― Edith Schaeffer, Hidden art

“The tight little segregated life, always spent with people your own age, economic group, educational background, and culture tends to bring an ingrown, static sort of condition. Fresh ideas, reality of communication and shared experiences will be sparks to light up fires of creativity, especially if the people spending time together are a true cross-section of ages, nationalities, kindred, and tongues" (p. 202).”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it”
― Edith Schaeffer

“A Christian, who realizes he has been made in the image of the Creator God and is therefore meant to be creative on a finite level, should certainly have more understanding of his responsibility to treat God's creation with sensitivity, and should develop his talents to do something to beautify his little spot on the earth's surface.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“God's fighting for us does not exclude the responsibility to be prepared for battle both in the area of strategy and in equipment. Trusting God completely in prayer, believing that He is able to do all things, does not remove the need to pray for His strength to accomplish what He has prepared us to do! We are to do what He is unfolding for us to do, fulfilling what God is giving us strength to do, acknowledging that it is His strength and not ours. It is a truly active passive, not a false whining humbleness that says, 'I can't do anything; I'm too weak.”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Life of Prayer

“Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavour of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems (p. 124).”
― Edith Schaeffer, The Hidden Art of Homemaking

“If you have been afraid that your love of beautiful flowers and the flickering flame of the candle is somehow less spiritual than living in starkness and ugliness, remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation.”
― Edith Schaeffer

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“It is indeed difficult to imagine how men who have entirely renounced the habit of managing their own affairs could be successful in choosing those who ought to lead them. It is impossible to believe that a liberal, energetic, and wise government can ever emerge from the ballots of a nation of servants.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“everybody feels the evil, but no one has courage or energy enough to seek the cure”
― Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

“Tyranny in democratic republics does not proceed in the same way, however. It ignores the body and goes straight for the soul. The master no longer says: You will think as I do or die. He says: You are free not to think as I do. You may keep your life, your property, and everything else. But from this day forth you shall be as a stranger among us. You will retain your civic privileges, but they will be of no use to you. For if you seek the votes of your fellow citizens, they will withhold them, and if you seek only their esteem, they will feign to refuse even that. You will remain among men, but you will forfeit your rights to humanity. When you approach your fellow creatures, they will shun you as one who is impure. And even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they, too, be shunned in turn. Go in peace, I will not take your life, but the life I leave you with is worse than death.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“Men cannot abandon their religious faith without a kind of aberration of intellect and a sort of violent distortion of their true nature; they are invincibly brought back to more pious sentiments. Unbelief is an accident, and faith is the only permanent state of mankind.”
― Alexis de Tocqueville

“Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
― Rudyard Kipling

“Your beliefs become your thoughts,
Your thoughts become your words,
Your words become your actions,
Your actions become your habits,
Your habits become your values,
Your values become your destiny.”
― Gandhi

“People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell

“Don't just say you have read books. Show that through them you have learned to think better, to be a more discriminating and reflective person. Books are the training weights of the mind. They are very helpful, but it would be a bad mistake to suppose that one has made progress simply by having internalized their contents.”
― Epictetus, The Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness and Effectiveness

“My loneliness was born when men praised my talkative faults and blamed my silent virtues.”
― Khalil Gibran, Sand and Foam

“We value virtue but do not discuss it. The honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife, the earnest scholar get little of our attention compared to the embezzler, the tramp, the cheat.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America

“There is no doubt that it is around the family and the home that all the greatest virtues, the most dominating virtues of human, are created, strengthened and maintained.”
― Winston S. Churchill

“It is possible to be honest every day. It is possible to live so that others can trust us-can trust our words, our motives, and our actions. Our examples are vital to those who sit at our feet as well as those who watch from a distance. Our own constant self-improvement will become as a polar star to those within our individual spheres of influence. They will remember longer what they saw in us than what they heard from us. Our attitude, our point of view, can make a tremendous difference.”
― Gordon B. Hinckley, Standing for Something: Ten Neglected Virtues That Will Heal Our Hearts and Homes

“Moderation in temper is always a virtue; but moderation in principle is always a vice.”
― Thomas Paine

“We do not place especial value on the possession of a virtue until we notice its total absence in our opponent.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Everyone there is filled full 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 at the source from which it comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.”
― St. Augustine