Nathan > Nathan's Quotes

“The riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Introduction to the Book of Job

“Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.”
― G. K. Chesterton

“And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“The more you continue to read Scripture, the more you begin to think as He thinks and act as He acts. And that’s how, over time, you gain the wisdom of the ages.”
― Wayne Cordeiro, The Divine Mentor: Growing Your Faith as You Sit at the Feet of the Savior

“I would like to coin the phrase alimentary theology, a theology that is more attentive to and welcoming of the multiple layers contained and implied in the making of theology. This is a theology that not only pays closer attention to matters related to food and nourishment, and the many ways they can relate, inspire, and inform theological reflection. Most importantly, it is an envisioning of theology as nourishment: food as theology and theology as food. Alimentary theology is envisioned as food for thought; it addresses some of the spiritual and physical hungers of the world, and seeks ways of bringing about nourishment.”
― Angel F. Mendez Montoya, The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist

“Fear the Lord in every way,
and you will become wise”
― Apocrypha

“The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life—if indeed we can conceive of it. Yet we have no indication that even Jesus was constantly awash with revelations as to what he should do. His union with the Father was so great that he was at all times obedient. This obedience was something that rested in his mature will and understanding of his life before God, not on always being told “Now do this” and “Now do that” with regard to every details of his life or work.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“To have found God and still to pursue Him is the soul’s paradox of love.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine

“At the foundation of moral thinking lie beliefs in statements the truth of which no further reason can be given.”
― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue

“To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes; if the prospect of his or her own future pleasure or happiness cannot for reasons which I have suggested provide criteria for solving the problems of action in the case of each individual, it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that.”
― Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue

“We be of one blood, ye and I”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

“Why would the disciples invent a God whose holiness was more terrifying than the forces of nature that provoked them to invent a god in the first place?”
― R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God

“If indeed we only have partial knowledge, it follows that a Christian perspective on politics should begin in a context of humility and love. As limited humans, we don’t have all of the answers. Instead of arrogantly proclaiming our political views, we should approach this subject, as all others, with awareness of our limitations and reliance on God’s love and wisdom”
― Amy E.E. Black, Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace, and Reason

“Perhaps God even impresses on the hearts of two Christian believers political views that seem, from our limited perspective, direct opposites.”
― Amy E.E. Black, Honoring God in Red or Blue: Approaching Politics with Humility, Grace, and Reason

“What is wisdom? It is the skill to achieve the perfect means by the perfect ends ”
― A.W. Tozer, The Attributes of God: Deeper into the Father's Heart

“When reason fails, the devil helps!”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.”
― Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men

“The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. When Don Quixote went out into the world, that world turned into a mystery before his eyes. That is the legacy of the first European novel to the entire subsequent history of the novel. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world, whether founded on Marx, Islam, or anything else, is a world of answers rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

“but why should I waste wisdom on a river-turtle?”
― Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Books

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

“Was man, indeed, at once so powerful, so virtuous and magnificent, yet so vicious and base? He appeared at one time a mere scion of the evil principle and at another as all that can be conceived of noble and godlike. To be a great and virtuous man appeared the highest honour that can befall a sensitive being; to be base and vicious, as many on record have been, appeared the lowest degradation, a condition more abject than that of the blind mole or harmless worm. For a long time I could not conceive how one man could go forth to murder his fellow, or even why there were laws and governments; but when I heard details of vice and bloodshed, my wonder ceased and I turned away with disgust and loathing.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Jesus not only revealed himself, he hid himself at the same time.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom

“With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom

“Rome remained great as long as she had enemies who forced her to unity, vision, and heroism. When she had overcome them all she flourished for a moment and then began to die.”
― Will Durant, Caesar and Christ

“but now and then liberty, in the slogans of the strong, means freedom from restraint in the exploitation of the weak.”
― Will Durant, Caesar and Christ

“for philosophy, Socrates, if pursued in moderation and at the proper age, is an elegant accomplishment, but too much philosophy is the ruin of human life.”
― Plato, Gorgias

“The matter with human beans," the BFG went on, "is that they is absolutely refusing to believe in anything unless they is actually seeing it right in front of their own schnozzles.”
― Roald Dahl, The BFG

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

[These words are also inscribed upon his grave]”
― Karl Marx, Eleven Theses on Feuerbach

“But the new generation had tasted the wine of philosophy; and from this time onward the rich youth of Rome went eagerly to Athens and Rhodes to exchange their oldest faith for the newest doubts.”
― Will Durant, Caesar and Christ