Alan > Alan's Quotes

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“We are glad you have been ordained as the first priest of your people. Now you can help us with their problem.' Tagoona asked, 'What is a problem?' and the white man said, 'Tagoona, if I held you by your heels from a third-story window, you would have a problem.' Tagoona considered this long and carefully. Then he said, 'I do not think so. If you saved me, all would be well. If you dropped me, nothing would matter. It is you who would have the problem.”
― Margaret Craven, I Heard the Owl Call My Name

“And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.”
― Edward R. Murrow

“True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.”
― Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here for?

“I like trains. I like their rhythm, and I like the freedom of being suspended between two places, all anxieties of purpose taken care of: for this moment I know where I am going.”
― Anna Funder, Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

“It's not getting from A to B. It's not the beginning or the destination that counts. It's the ride in between...This train is alive with things that should be seen and heard. It's a living, breathing something -- you just have to want to learn its rhythm.”
― David Baldacci, The Christmas Train

“The train is a small world moving through a larger world.”
― Elisha Cooper, Train

“Trains are beautiful. They take people to places they've never been, faster than they could ever go themselves. Everyone who works on trains knows they have personalities, they're like people. They have their own mysteries.”
― Sam Starbuck, The Dead Isle

“...what thrills me about trains is not their size or their equipment but the fact that they are moving, that they embody a connection between unseen places.”
― Marianne Wiggins

“Unfortunately, Bretorius had found mediocrity too high a bar. He had advanced in the fleet the old-fashioned way: he’d stuck around so long they had to give him a command, or muster him out.”
― John Jackson Miller, Star Trek: The Next Generation: Takedown

“Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“prayer is at the very heart of what it means to believe.”
― Timothy Keller, Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God

“(When someone asked Augustine what God was doing before creation, he replied that God was making hell for people who ask silly questions.)”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Simplicity is a great virtue, but oversimplification can actually be a vice, a sign of laziness.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Jesus: A New Vision of Who He Was, What He Did, and Why He Matters

“Thus, by the end of AD 32, Jesus’ teaching, his miracles, his emphasis on the poor, the marginalised and the unclean and his almost total disrespect for religious leaders had resulted in distrust and even animosity. But although various groups had been moved to violence against him, there was no intentional coherent strategy to remove him. He was not seen as that much of a danger. Then, in the early spring of AD 33, he did something that changed things entirely, something really annoying: he raised a man from the dead.”
― Nick Page, The Longest Week: The truth about Jesus' last days

“Remember: I am a cartoonist. If you follow my advice on safety around nuclear materials, you probably deserve whatever happens to you.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“X-Plane tells us that flight on Mars is difficult, but not impossible. NASA knows this, and has considered surveying Mars by airplane. The tricky thing is that with so little atmosphere, to get any lift, you have to go fast. You need to approach Mach 1 just to get off the ground, and once you get moving, you have so much inertia that it’s hard to change course—if you turn, your plane rotates, but keeps moving in the original direction. The X-Plane author compared piloting Martian aircraft to flying a supersonic ocean liner.”
― Randall Munroe, What If? 10th Anniversary Edition: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

“Think where you are, sir Knight,” Nicodemus said, his mouth quirking up into a mocking smile. “The Underworld is a prison for souls. Do you think yours is so great as to escape it?” “I am not great,” Michael said quietly. “But God is.”
― Jim Butcher, Skin Game

“Whenever you’ve got a choice, do good, kiddo. It isn’t always fun or easy, but in the long run it makes your life better.”
― Jim Butcher, Working for Bigfoot

“The screen went black before I was out of the airlock. Turns out the “L” in “LCD” stands for “Liquid.” I guess it either froze or boiled off. Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. “Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“Yes, of course duct tape works in a near-vacuum. Duct tape works anywhere. Duct tape is magic and should be worshiped.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“It was great! Straight-A student. Hanging around nerdy guys too scared to try anything. No wild side at all. You were every father’s dream daughter.” “Thanks, Dad, I—” “But then you got on a giant bomb that blasted you to Mars. And I mean that literally.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular”
― Edward R. Murrow

“I nodded and sipped my own. Wow. Mac’s beer is an excellent argument that there is a God, and that furthermore, He wants us to be happy.”
― Jim Butcher, Skin Game

“Hope lets you do things you would otherwise never be able to do, gives strength when everything is darkest. In”
― Jim Butcher, Skin Game

“Message reads: 'Houston, be advised: Rich Purnell is a steely-eyed missile man.”
― Andy Weir, The Martian

“The founders of the United States,” he declared, “proclaimed to the world the American belief that all men are created equal. . . . We shall not, however, finally achieve the ideals for which this nation was founded so long as any American suffers discrimination as a result of his race, or religion, or color, or the land of origin of his forefathers.”
― Zachary Karabell, The Last Campaign: How Harry Truman Won the 1948 Election

“In deploring spin while also desiring it, Barack Obama is like the rest of us. We denounce spin when we see it as misleading. But we embrace spin when we see it as leading.”
― David Greenberg, Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency

“The season of Lent is a participation in God’s life, not an entrance fee to heaven. Our security comes from resting in God’s free gift.”
― Aaron Damiani, The Good of Giving Up: Discovering the Freedom of Lent