Dwayne Goins > Dwayne's Quotes

“A true opium of the people is a belief in nothingness after death - the huge solace of thinking that for our betrayals, greed, cowardice, murders we are not going to be judged.”
― Czeslaw Milosz

“sarcasm and jokes were often the bottle in which clinical depressives sent out their most plangent screams for someone to care and help them.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”
― Soren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“Psychoanalysis is a science conducted by lunatics for lunatics. They are generally concerned with proving that people are irresponsible; and they certainly succeed in proving that some people are”
― G.K. Chesterton

“Science must not impose any philosophy, any more than the telephone must tell us what to say.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“What looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmask itself as a religious movement.”
― Soren Kieregaaard

“Sometimes I think it is my mission to bring faith to the faithless, and doubt to the faithful.”
― Paul Tillich

“Do you not know that there comes a midnight hour when every one has to throw off his mask? Do you believe that life will always let itself be mocked? Do you think you can slip away a little before midnight in order to avoid this? Or are you not terrified by it? I have seen men in real life who so long deceived others that at last their true nature could not reveal itself;... In every man there is something which to a certain degree prevents him from becoming perfectly transparent to himself; and this may be the case in so high a degree, he may be so inexplicably woven into relationships of life which extend far beyond himself that he almost cannot reveal himself. But he who cannot reveal himself cannot love, and he who cannot love is the most unhappy man of all.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“When we learn to read the story of Jesus and see it as the story of the love of God, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves--that insight produces, again and again, a sense of astonished gratitude which is very near the heart of authentic Christian experience.”
― N.T. Wright

“Beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.”
― John Wesley, Letters of John Wesley

“ I will give you this, my love, and I will not bargain or barter any longer. I will love you, as sure as He has loved me. I will discover what I can discover and though you remain a mystery, save God's own knowledge, what I disclose of you I will keep in the warmest chamber of my heart, the very chamber where God has stowed Himself in me. And I will do this to my death, and to death it may bring me.
I will love you like God, because of God, mighted by the power of God. I will stop expecting your love, demanding you love, trading for your love, gaming for your love. I will simply love. I am giving myself to you, and tomorrow I will do it again. I suppose the clock itself will wear thin its time before I am ended at this altar of dying and dying again.
God risked Himself on me. I will risk myself on you. And together, we will learn to love, and perhaps then, and only then, understand this gravity that drew Him, unto us.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“Instead of hating the people you think are war-makers, hate the appetites and disorder in your own soul, which are the causes of war. If you love peace, then hate injustice, hate tyranny, hate greed - but hate these things in yourself, not in another.”
― Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation

“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them”
― Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island

“The matter is quite simple. The bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard

“Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human”
― Paul Tillich

“Jesus didn't really die-someone gave him a long drug that made him look like dead, and he revived in the tomb. Answer: Roman soldiers knew how to kill people, and no disciple would have been fooled by a half-drugged, beat-up Jesus into thinking he'd defeated death and inaugurated the kingdom.”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“What we have at the moment isn't as the old liturgies used to say, 'the sure and certain hope of the resurrection of the dead,' but a vague and fuzzy optimism that somehow things may work out in the end. ”
― N.T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church

“I really only love God as much as I love the person I love the least.”
― Dorothy Day

“Love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Airman's Odyssey

“I have got, over the years, a sense of the immense sweep of creation, of the evolutionary process in everything, of how incomprehensible God must necessarily be to be the God of heaven and earth. You can’t fit the Almighty into your intellectual categories…. What kept me a skeptic [of secularism] in college was precisely my Christian faith. It always said: wait, don’t bite on this, get a wider picture, continue to read. If you want your faith, you have to work for it…. Even in the life of a Christian, faith rises and falls like the tides of an invisible sea. It’s there, even when he can’t see it or feel it, if he wants it to be there. You realize, I think, that it is more valuable, more mysterious, altogether more immense than anything you can learn or decide in college. Learn what you can, but cultivate Christian skepticism.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“My principal sin is doubt. I doubt everything, and am in doubt most of the time.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

“If in my life I fail completely to heed others, solely out of a desire to be 'devout' and to perform my 'religious duties', then my relationship with God will also grow arid. It becomes merely 'proper', but loveless.”
― Pope Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), God is Love: Deus Caritas Est

“The human person finds his perfection "in seeking and loving what is true and good.”
― Joseph Ratzinger

“Seeing with the eyes of Christ, I can give to others much more than their outward necessities; I can give them the look of love which they crave.”
― Pope Benedict XVI, God is Love: Deus Caritas Est

“Mediocrity is contextual.”
― David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

“To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“If you study a lot because you are worried that others will think badly of you for being ignorant and you'll feel stupid, this is a serious mistake.”
― Dogen Zenji

“Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“To love someone means to see them as God intended them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky