Sunday, November 21, 2010

You Are a Soul




Sometimes in the course of my "real job" I have the pleasure of looking for quotes that are used to reinforce a PowerPoint point. I always enjoy scouring quote sites and marveling at the ingenious things people have said over the years. I particularly love C.S. Lewis quotes. He had such a unique way of putting profound truths.









And a few more...


"Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another: "What! You too? I thought I was the only one."

"We read to know that we are not alone."

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable."
(The Four Loves)

"You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me."

"The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us."

"If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world."

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

"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."

"Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival."

"No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."

"We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be."

"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."

"A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell."

"God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing."

"I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time- waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God- it changes me."

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."

"Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained."

"Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world."

"The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts."

"I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity."

"What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it."

"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."

"Experience is a brutal teacher, but you learn. My God, do you learn."

"He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less."

"If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you."

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it."

"There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind."

"Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably."

"Now the trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed."

"There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. Those who knock it is opened. "

"You can make anything by writing."
"It is when we notice the dirt that God is most present in us; it is the very sign of His presence."

"Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil."

"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is."

"Crying is all right in its own way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do."

"I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?"


3 comments:

  1. Love the last one especially. Great post, Leisa... feed them to us one at a time so we can digest them! Did you do the beautiful scenic/artistic quotes?
    My, my... you are talent personified. Have a happy Thanksgiving week with the family!

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  2. Thanks Susan! I did do the quotes, there is so much to work with...I'm thinking about using the last one for our Christmas card thus year.

    Hope you all are doing well, and hope you have a wonderful thanksgiving too. Let's get together again soon!

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  3. Love the quotations, Leisa. And love that C.S. Lewis is a favorite of yours, too.
    m :)

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