Asher Burns > Asher's Quotes

“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. Catch him at the moment when he is really poor in spirit and smuggle into his mind the gratifying reflection, 'By jove! I'm being humble!', and almost immediately pride—pride at his own humility—will appear. If he awakes to the danger and tries to smother this new form of pride, make him proud of his attempt—and so on, through as many stages a you please. But don't try this too long, for fear you may awake his sense of humour and proportion, in which case he will merely laugh at you and go to bed.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“Right is right, even if everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it.”
― William Penn

“He who has God and everything else has no more than he who has God only.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

“Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.”
― C. S. Lewis

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A man who is thirsty stands before a fountain. "No," he says, "I will never touch a drop of moisture as long as I live. Cannot I get my thirst quenched in my own way?" We tell him, no; he must drink or die. He says, "I will never drink; but it is a hard thing that I must therefore die. It is a bigoted, cruel thing to tell me so." He is wrong. His thirst is the inevitable result of neglecting a law of nature. You, too, must believe or die; why refuse to obey the command? Drink, man, drink! Take Christ and live.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Around the Wicket Gate

“We shall not adjust our Bible to the age; but before we have done with it, by God’s grace, we shall adjust the age to the Bible.”
― Charles H. Spurgeon

“A sermon without Christ in it is like a loaf of bread without any flour in it. No Christ in your sermon, sir? Then go home, and never preach again until you have something worth preaching.”
― Charles Spurgeon

“Defend the Bible? I would as soon defend a lion! Unchain it and it will defend itself.”
― Charles Haddon Sprugeon

“I have learned to kiss the waves that throw me up against the Rock of Ages”
― Charles H. Spurgeon

“So the hammers of infidels have been pecking away at this book for ages, but the hammers are worn out, and the anvil still endures. If this book had not been the book of God, men would have destroyed it long ago. Emperors and popes, kings and priests, princes and rulers have all tried their hand at it; they die and the book still lives.”
― Horace Lorenzo Hastings

“Knowing what's right doesn't mean much unless you do what's right.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses

“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

“The believer mortifies sin, because God loves him; but the legalist, that God may love him.”
― Ralph Erskine

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Since man ceases not to be sinful, it is a great blessing that Jehovah ceases not to be merciful.”
― Charles Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, Volumes #1-3

“God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the ‘cause’, in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war-effort or of Pacifism.”
― C.S. Lewis, A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

“All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy are to be encouraged. Not always, of course, but at this period. Some ages are lukewarm and complacent, and then it is our business to soothe them yet faster asleep. Other ages, of which the present is one, are unbalanced and prone to faction, and it is our business to inflame them.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

“In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.”
― Rupertus Meldenius

“In the resurrection of Christ, as in our salvation, there was put forth nothing short of a divine power. What shall we say of those who think that conversion is wrought by the free will of man, and is due to his own betterness of disposition? When we shall see the dead rise from the grave by their own power, then may we expect to see ungodly sinners of their own free will turning to Christ. It is not the word preached, nor the word read in itself; all quickening power proceeds from the Holy Ghost. This power was irresistible. All the soldiers and the high priests could not keep the body of Christ in the tomb; Death himself could not hold Jesus in his bonds: even thus irresistible is the power put forth in the believer when he is raised to newness of life. No sin, no corruption, no devils in hell nor sinners upon earth, can stay the hand of God's grace when it intends to convert a man. If God omnipotently says, "Thou shalt," man shall not say, "I will not.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Morning and Evening, Based on the English Standard Version

“Again, we are taught by this passage, that if we wish to obtain the knowledge of Christ, we must seek it from the Scriptures; for they who imagine whatever they choose concerning Christ will ultimately have nothing instead of him but a shadowy phantom. First, then, we ought to believe that Christ cannot be properly known in any other way than from the Scriptures; and if it be so, it follows that we ought to read the Scriptures with the express design of finding Christ in them. Whoever shall turn aside from this object, though he may weary himself throughout his whole life in learning, will never attain the knowledge of the truth; for what wisdom can we have without the wisdom of God? Next, as we are commanded to seek Christ in the Scriptures, so he declares in this passage that our labours shall not be fruitless; for the Father testifies in them concerning his Son in such a manner that He will manifest him to us beyond all doubt. But what hinders the greater part of men from profiting is, that they give to the subject nothing more than a superficial and cursory glance. Yet it requires the utmost attention, and, therefore, Christ enjoins us to search diligently for this hidden treasure.”
― John Calvin, John

“The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander he may be worse than most thieves. It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“The effort to make financial or political profit out of the destruction of character can only result in public calamity. Gross and reckless assaults on character, whether on the stump or in newspaper, magazine, or book, create a morbid and vicious public sentiment, and at the same time act as a profound deterrent to able men of normal sensitiveness and tend to prevent them from entering the public service at any price.”
― Theodore Roosevelt

“My text doesn’t say, “being justified by faith, we feel we are at peace with God.” It doesn’t say that. It says, “we have peace with God.” It’s not a feeling. It’s a fact. Peace with God is not an emotional state of religious euphoria. If it were, we would be in a very precarious position, since our emotions ebb and flow like the tides of the sea. But it isn’t a feeling. It is a relationship, which is a stable relationship because God has established it through Jesus Christ and our fluctuating feelings can not alter it. Peace with God is an objective fact based upon an objective event: the death of Jesus Christ, and it’s these objectivities, these rocks, if our feet stand firmly upon them, which will rescue us from the shifting sands of subjectivity.”
― John R.W. Stott

“A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.”
― H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America

“There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, Mine!”
― Abraham Kuyper

“There is more mercy in Christ than sin in us.”
― Richard Sibbes

“The man who is right is a majority. He who has God and conscience on his side, has a majority against the universe.”
― Frederick Douglass