Tim > Tim's Quotes

“I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a
soul above buttons.”
― George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying

“Even there, in the mines, underground, I may find a human heart in another convict and murderer by my side, and I may make friends with him, for even there one may live and love and suffer. One may thaw and revive a frozen heart in that convict, one may wait upon him for years, and at last bring up from the dark depths a lofty soul, a feeling, suffering creature; one may bring forth an angel, create a hero! There are so many of them, hundreds of them, and we are all to blame for them. [...] If they drive God from the earth, we shall shelter Him underground.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“But twice-two-makes-four is for all that a most insupportable thing. Twice-two-makes-four is, in my humble opinion, nothing but a piece of impudence. Twice-two-makes-four is a farcical, dressed-up fellow who stands across your path with arms akimbo and spits at you.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“However, do you know what? I am convinced that fellows like me who live in dark cellars must be kept under restraint. They may be able to live in their dark cellars for forty years and never open their mouths, but the moment they get into the light of day and break out they may talk and talk and talk...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“For though your mind is active enough, your heart is darkened with corruption, and without a pure heart there can be no full or genuine sensibility.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“There are certain things in a man's past which he does not divulge to everybody but, perhaps, only to his friends. Again there are certain things he will not divulge even to his friends; he will divulge them perhaps only to himself, and that, too, as a secret. But, finally, there are things which he is afraid to divulge even to himself, and every decent man has quite an accumulation of such things in his mind. I can put it even this way: the more decent a man is, the larger will the number of such things be.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes from Underground, White Nights, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, and Selections from The House of the Dead

“Instead of proclaiming the ideals, they educe what experience teaches, what the experience of all the centuries has taught, that the millions get no further than mediocrity.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom

“For, after all, you do grow up, you do outgrow your ideals, which turn to dust and ashes, which are shattered into fragments; and if you have no other life, you just have to build one up out of these fragments. And all the time your soul is craving and longing for something else. And in vain does the dreamer rummage about in his old dreams, raking them over as though they were a heap of cinders, looking in these cinders for some spark, however tiny, to fan it into a flame so as to warm his chilled blood by it and revive in it all that he held so dear before, all that touched his heart, that made his blood course through his veins, that drew tears from his eyes, and that so splendidly deceived him!”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, White Nights and Other Stories

“... I retraced my steps, walked up to her, and in another moment would have certainly said, "Madam!" if I had not known that that exclamation had been made a thousand times before in all Russian novels of high life. It was that alone that stopped me.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights

“I might be tempted to make to Christendom a proposal different from that of the Bible society. Let us collect all the New Testaments we have, let us bring them out to an open square or up to the summit of a mountain, and while we all kneel let one man speak to God thus: 'Take this book back again; we men, such as we now are, are not fit to go in for this sort of thing, it only makes us unhappy,' This is my proposal, that like those inhabitants in Gerasa we beseech Christ to depart from our borders. This would be an honest and human way of talking -- rather different from the disgusting hypocritical priestly fudge...”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom

“But the eternal is not a thing which can be had regardless of the way in which it is acquired; no, the eternal is not really a thing, but is the way in which it is acquired.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Attack upon Christendom

“It is a child speaking," said Merlin, "not a king and not a knight, but a hurt and angry child, or you would know, my lord, that there is more to a king than a crown, and far more to a knight than a sword. You were a knight when you grappled Pellinore unarmed."

"And he defeated me."

"You were a knight," said Merlin. "Somewhere in the world there is defeat for everyone. Some are destroyed by defeat, and some made small and mean by victory. Greatness lives in one who triumphs equally over defeat and victory.”
― John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

“No one doubts your courage, but you are a headstrong knight and when you choose a way you cannot change your course even if it lead to your destruction. That is your fault and your destiny.”
― John Steinbeck, The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights

“The poet was, of course, always present to assist the debater. Though the logic of Lewis's Christian apologetics may be fallible, the imagination of the writing with its brilliantly-conceived analogies is itself enough to win a reader to his side. As Austin Farrer expressed it, "We think we are listening to an argument; in fact we are presented with a vision; and it is the vision that carries conviction.”
― Humphrey Carpenter, The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, and Their Friends

“Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“There was nothing medieval people liked better, or did better, than sorting out and tidying up. Of all our modern inventions I suspect that they would most have admired the card index.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature

“[...] the war between good and evil existed no longer, for the thing beneath the Graal was not fighting but vomiting.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“There is no possible idea," Kenneth thought as he came onto the terrace, "to which the mind of man can't supply some damned alternative or other. Yet one must act.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“Why was this bloody world created?"

"As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever."

" [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“but it was a religion which enabled him to despise himself and everyone else without despising the universe, thus allowing him at once in argument or conversation to the advantages of the pessimist and the optimist.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“The two things that came out clearly were the sense of reality in the background and the mythical value: the essence of myth being that it should have no taint of allegory to the maker and yet should suggest incipient allegories to the reader.
[C.S. Lewis writes to J.R.R. Tolkien on December 7, 1929]”
― C.S. Lewis

“Poetry most often communicates emotions, not directly, but by creating imaginatively the grounds for those emotions. It therefore communicates something more than the emotion; only by means of that something more does it communicate the emotion at all.”
― C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

“If ants had a language they would, no doubt, call their anthill an artifact and describe the brick wall in its neighborhood as a natural object. Nature in fact would be for them all that was not 'ant-made'.”
― C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

“But the greatest cause of verbicide is the fact that most people are obviously far more anxious to express their approval and disapproval of things than to describe them. Hence the tendency of words to become less descriptive and more evaluative; then become evaluative, while still retaining some hint of the sort of goodness or badness implied; and to end up by being purely evaluative -- useless synonyms for good or for bad.”
― C.S. Lewis, Studies in Words

“No, thou art come too late, Empedocles!
And the world hath the day, and must break thee,
Not thou the world. With men thou canst not live,
Their thoughts, their ways, their wishes, are not thine;
And being lonely thou art miserable,
For something has impair'd they spirit's strength,
And dried its self-sufficing font of joy.”
― Matthew Arnold, Empedocles On Etna And Other Poems

“You all know," said the Guide, "that security is mortals' greatest enemy.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Pilgrim's Regress

“No, I can't stop for sonnets; my mother is sitting up. I'll look you up tomorrow, sometime or other, and do for goodness' sake try and realise that you're a pestilential scourge, or your find yourself in a most awful fix. Good-night!”
― Kenneth Grahame, The Reluctant Dragon

“As learnèd commentators view
In Homer more than Homer knew.”
― Jonathan Swift, Jonathan Swift's on Poetry: A Rapsody--A Critical Edition with a Historical Introduction and Commentary

“Are the gods not just?"

"Oh no, child. What would become of us if they were?”
― C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces