Melissa > Melissa's Quotes

“It's the job that's never started as takes longest to finish.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible, and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

“Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
― Narcotics Anonymous

“I do not miss childhood, but I miss the way I took pleasure in small things, even as greater things crumbled. I could not control the world I was in, could not walk away from things or people or moments that hurt, but I took joy in the things that made me happy.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane

“If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient. It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
― C.S. Lewis

“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

“Suspicion often creates what it suspects.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“She's the sort of woman who lives for others - you can tell the others by their hunted expression.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“When He [God] talks of their losing their selves, He means only abandoning the clamour of self-will; once they have done that, He really gives them back all their personality, and boasts (I am afraid, sincerely) that when they are wholly His they will be more themselves than ever.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others...thus, while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“When they have really learned to love their neighbours as themselves, they will be allowed to love themselves as their neighbours.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility.”
― C.S. Lewis, Screwtape Letters

“The event of falling in love is of such a nature that we are right to reject as intolerable the idea that it should be transitory. In one high bound it has overleaped the massive of our selfhood; it has made appetite itself altruistic, tossed personal happiness aside as a triviality and planted the interests of another in the centre of our being. Spontaneously and without effort we have fulfilled the law (towards one person) by loving our neighbour as ourselves. It is an image, a foretaste, of what we must become to all if Love Himself rules in us without a rival. It is even (well used) a preparation for that.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“Need-love cries to God from our poverty; Gift-love longs to serve, or even to suffer for, God; Appreciative love says: “We give thanks to thee for thy great glory.” Need-love says of a woman “I cannot live without her”; Gift-love longs to give her happiness, comfort, protection – if possible, wealth; Appreciative love gazes and holds its breath and is silent, rejoices that such a wonder should exist even if not for him, will not be wholly dejected by losing her, would rather have it so than never to have seen her at all.” p.17”
― C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

“No, no! The adventures first, explanations take such a dreadful time.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“have i gone mad?
im afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usualy are.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“I know who I WAS when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“I'm afraid I can't explain myself, sir. Because I am not myself, you see?”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

“How puzzling all these changes are! I'm never sure what I'm going to be, from one minute to another.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.”
― Lewis Carroll

“Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.”
― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland / Through the Looking-Glass

“It is a safe thing to trust Him to fulfill the desires which He creates”
― amy carmichael