Matt

“every human being who is born into this universe is like a child who has been given a key to an infinite Library, written in cyphers that are more or less obscure, arranged by a scheme—of which we can at first know nothing, other than that there does appear to be some scheme.”
― Neal Stephenson, The Confusion

“We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.”
― Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

“They gave themselves up to the stars the way swimmers can surrender to the waves, and the stars took them without resistance.”
― Mark Helprin, Winter's Tale

“The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than 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. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.”
― Dallas Willard