Alexis Johnson > Alexis's Quotes

“Next to the Word of God, music deserves the highest praise. The gift of language combined with the gift of song was given to man that he should proclaim the Word of God through Music.”
― Martin Luther

“But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away
"blindly" so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality
is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very
first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new
self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.
The principle runs through all life from top to bottom. Give up your self,
and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.
Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“It’s what we wanted: contact with another civilization. We have it, this contact! Our own monstrous ugliness, our own buffoonery and shame, magnified as if it was under a microscope!”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Art reveals the power of the intuitive, capturing the reality hiding beneath the culture. The”
― Makoto Fujimura, Silence and Beauty: Hidden Faith Born of Suffering

“It takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on a battlefield”
― William Butler Yeats

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”
― Albert Camus

“To develop a self one must exercise choice and learn from the consequences of those choices; if the only thing you are taught is to comply, you have little way of knowing what you like and want.”
― Bruce D. Perry, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“The wise warrior avoids the battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“He who is prudent and lies in wait for an enemy who is not, will be victorious.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, your victory will not stand in doubt; if you know Heaven and know Earth, you may make your victory complete.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

“When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Clash of Kings

“Once, men and women were able to turn themselves into eagles and fly immense distances. They communed with rivers and mountains and received wisdom from them. They felt the turning of the stars inside their own minds. My contemporaries did not understand this. They were all enamoured with the idea of progress and believed that whatever was new must be superior to what was old. As if merit was a function of chronology! But it seemed to me that the wisdom of the ancients could not have simply vanished. Nothing simply vanishes. It’s not actually possible.”
― Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”
― T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“Fantasy is hardly an escape from reality. It's a way of understanding it.”
― Lloyd Alexander

“When things go wrong, you'll find they usually go on getting worse for some time; but when things once start going right they often go on getting better and better.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

“Do not by any means destroy yourself, for if you live you may yet have good fortune, but all the dead are dead like.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy