Nathan > Nathan's Quotes

“An enlightened trust in the sovereignty of human reason can be every bit as magical as the exploits of Merlin, and a faith in our capacity for limitless self-improvement just as much a wide-eyed superstition as a faith in leprechauns.”
― Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate

“Insofar as he makes use of his healthy senses, man himself is the best and most exact scientific instrument possible. The greatest misfortune of modern physics is that its experiments have been set apart from man, as it were, physics refuses to recognize nature in anything not shown by artificial instruments, and even uses this as a measure of its accomplishments.”
― Goethe

“Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.”
― John Michael Greer

“To bracket form and finality out of one's investigations as far as reason allows is a matter of method, but to deny their reality altogether is a matter of metaphysics.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“Christianity has from its beginning portrayed itself as a gospel of peace, a way of reconciliation (with God, with other creatures), and a new model of human community, offering the 'peace which passes understanding' to a world enmeshed in sin and violence. (1)”
― David Bentley Hart

“I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.”
― Jandy Nelson, The Sky Is Everywhere

“There's no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.”
― Johnny Cash, Cash

“You build on failure. You use it as a stepping stone. Close the door on the past. You don't try to forget the mistakes, but you don't dwell on it. You don't let it have any of your energy, or any of your time, or any of your space.”
― Johnny Cash

“I love weather. I'm a connoisseur of weather. Wherever my travels take me, the first thing I do is turn on the weather channel and see what's going on, what's coming. I like to know about regional weather patterns, how storms are created in different altitudes, what kinds of clouds are forming or dissipating or blowing through, where the winds are coming from, where they've been. That's not a passion everybody shares, I know, but I don't believe there are any people on earth who, properly sheltered, don't feel the peace inside a summer rain and the cleansing it brings, the renewal of the earth in its aftermath.”
― Johnny Cash, Cash

“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.”
― John F. Kennedy

“When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.”
― Maya Angelou

“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.”
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything

“Let gratitude be the pillow upon which you kneel to say your nightly prayer. And let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good.”
― Maya Angelou, Celebrations: Rituals of Peace and Prayer

“True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient, for he that is so wants nothing. The greatest blessings of mankind are within us and within our reach. A wise man is content with his lot, whatever it may be, without wishing for what he has not.”
― Seneca

“The purpose of journeying together in spiritual friendship and spiritual community (whether there are just two of you or whether you are in a small group) is to listen to one another's desire for God, to nurture that desire in each other and to support one another in seeking a way of life that is consistent with that desire. ”
― Ruth Haley Barton, Sacred Rhythms: Arranging Our Lives for Spiritual Transformation

“Whatever is the lot of humankind
I want to taste within my deepest self.
I want to seize the highest and the lowest,
to load its woe and bliss upon my breast,
and thus expand my single self titanically
and in the end go down with all the rest.”
― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, First Part

“Fear is such a powerful emotion for humans that when we allow it to take us over, it drives compassion right out of our hearts.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.”
― Thomas Aquinas

“The things that we love tell us what we are.”
― St. Thomas Aquinas

“To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation.”
― Yann Martel, Life of Pi

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“I wonder how many people I've looked at all my life and never seen.”
― John Steinbeck, The Winter of Our Discontent

“It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The Innocence of Father Brown

“Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“We should always endeavor to wonder at the permanent thing, not at the mere exception. We should be startled by the sun, and not by the eclipse. We should wonder less at the earthquake, and wonder more at the earth.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances that we know to be desperate.”
― G.K. Chesterton