Notable Quotes

[One Bad Pig]

A time will come when the whole world will go mad. And to anyone who is not mad they will say “You are mad, for you are not like us.” - St. Anthony the Great

[lee_merrill]

"Cry for grace from God to be able to see God's hand in every trial, and then for grace to submit at once to it. Not only to submit, but to acquiesce, and to rejoice in it. I think there is generally an end to troubles when we get to that." (Charles Spurgeon)

"If anyone could tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and perfection, he must tell you to make it a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you. For it is certain that whatever seeming calamity happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing." (William Law)

[One Bad Pig]

Morning prayer of St. Ambrose of Milan

"Light that You are, illumine our senses, and shake sleep from our minds; may our first words be of You, and may Your praise open our mouths."

[lee_merrill]

Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord God, whereby thou wilt receive his strength and power from whence life comes, to allay all tempests, against blusterings and storms. That is it which moulds up into patience, into innocency, into soberness, into stillness, into stayedness, into quietness, up to God, with his power.

- George Fox

[lee_merrill]

"The only safe way to treat our failures is neither to justify nor condemn ourselves on account of them, but to lay them quietly and in simplicity before the Lord, in peace and in the spirit of love. All the old writers tell us that our progress is aided far more by a simple, peaceful turning to God, than by all our chagrin and remorse over our lapses from Him. Only be faithful, they say, in turning quietly to Him alone, the moment you perceive what you have done, and His presence will deliver you from the snares which have entrapped you. To look at self plunges you deeper into the swamp, for this very swamp is after all nothing but self; while the gentlest look towards God will calm and deliver your heart."

"Finally, let us never forget for one moment, no matter how often we may fail, that the Lord Jesus is able, according to the declaration concerning Him, to deliver us, that we may 'serve Him without fear, in holiness and righteousness before Him all the days of our life.' "

- Hannah Smith

[lee_merrill]

Heed not distressing thoughts, when they rise ever so strongly in you; nay, though they have entered you, fear them not, but be still a while, not believing in the power which you feel they have over you, and it will fall on a sudden.

- Isaac Penington

[rogue06]

Heard this on the radio today and am looking for the full quote (I can find only bits of it)

I have alternately been called an aristocrat and a democrat. I am neither. I am a Christocrat. ... He alone who created and redeemed man is qualified to govern him -- Quoted in Benjamin Rush's eulogy. He was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, Surgeon General of the Continental Army and was founder of the first anti-slavery society in America.

[Littlejoe]

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to His power. If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words, 'God can.' It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.” -C.S. Lewis "The Problem of Pain"

[rogue06]

"Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good." --Archbishop Charles J. Chaput of Philadelphia

[One Bad Pig]

When you are dead, you don't know that you are dead. It is difficult only for the others. It is the same when you are stupid.

(not sure where it comes from, but )

[stfoskey15]

"No pleasure is in itself evil, but the things which produce certain pleasures entail annoyances many times greater than the pleasures themselves." -Epicurus

"God either wishes to take away evils, and is unable; or He is able, and is unwilling; or He is neither willing nor able, or He is both willing and able. If He is willing and is unable, He is feeble, which is not in accordance with the character of God; if He is able and unwilling, He is envious, which is equally at variance with God; if He is neither willing nor able, He is both envious and feeble, and therefore not God; if He is both willing and able, which alone is suitable to God, from what source then are evils? Or why does He not remove them?" -attributed to Epicurus

"Number is the ruler of forms and ideas, and the cause of gods and demons." -Pythagoras

[One Bad Pig]

Materialism is a conviction based not upon evidence or logic but upon what Carl Sagan (speaking of another kind of faith) called a "deep-seated need to believe." Considered purely as a rational philosophy, it has little to recommend it; but as an emotional sedative, what Czeslaw Milosz liked to call the opiate of unbelief, it offers a refuge from so many elaborate perplexities, so many arduous spiritual exertions, so many trying intellectual and moral problems, so many exhausting expressions of hope or fear, charity or remorse. In this sense, it should be classified as one of those religions of consolation whose purpose is not to engage the mind or will with the mysteries of being but merely to provide a palliative for existential grievances and private disappointments. Popular atheism is not a philosophy but a therapy. Perhaps, then, it should not be condemned for its philosophical deficiencies, or even treated as an intellectual posture of any kind, but recognized as a form of simple devotion, all the more endearing for its mixture of tender awkwardnesss and charming pomposity. Even the stridency, bigotry, childishness, and ignorance with which the currrent atheist vogue typically expresses itself should perhaps be excused as no more than an effervescence of primitive fervor on the part of those who, finding themselves poised upon a precipice overlooking the abyss of ultimate absurdity, have made a madly valiant leap of faith. That said, any religion of consolation that evangelically strives to supplant other creeds, as popular atheism now does, has a certain burden of moral proof to bear: it must show that the opiates it offers are at least as powerful as those it would replace. To proclaim triumphally that there is no God, no eternal gaze that beholds our cruelties and betrayals, no final beatitude for the soul after death, may seem bold and admirable to a comfortable bourgeois academic who rarely if ever has to descend into the misery of those whose lives are at best a state of constant anxiety or at worst the indelible memory of the death of a child. For a man safely sheltered from life's harder edges, a gentle soporific may suffice to ease whatever fleeting moments of distress or resentment afflict him. For those genuinely acquainted with grief, however - despair, povery, calmity, disease, oppression, or bereavement - but who have no ivory tower to which to retreat, no material advantages to distract them from their suffering, and no hope for any thing better in this world, something far stronger may be needed. If there is no God, then the universe (astonishing accident that it is) is a brute event of boundless magnificence and abysmal anguish, which only illusion and myth may have the power to make tolerable. Only extraordingary callousness or fatuous sanctimony could make one insensible to this. Moreover, if there is no God, truth is not an ultimate good - there is no such thing as an ultimate good - and the more merciful course might well be not to preach unbelief but to tell "noble lies" and fabricate "pious frauds" and conjure up ever more enchanting illusions for the solace of those in torment.
- David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness,Bliss

[stfoskey15]

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear."
-Thomas Jefferson

[One Bad Pig]

Our Fathers are in the habit of saying that if someone rebukes another when he is burning with anger, he is merely fulfilling his own evil inclination, and no wise man would destroy his own house to build up his neighbor's. While the disturbance lasts, put a curb on your heart and pray in this way: 'O Merciful God and lover of souls who created us out of nothing to communicate your own goodness to us and, when we fled away from your commandments, called us back through the bloody sacrifice of your Son, our Savior, come not to the help of our weakness, and as you once calmed the waves of the sea, so now put an end to the rage in our hearts.'

- Dorotheos of Gaza

[Littlejoe]

Marriage Advice from 1886

Let your love be stronger than your hate or anger.
Learn the wisdom of compromise, for it is better to bend a little than to break.
Believe the best rather than the worst.
People have a way of living up or down to your opinion of them.
Remember that true friendship is the basis for any lasting relationship. The person you choose to marry is deserving of the courtesies and kindnesses you bestow on your friends.
Pleas hand this down to your children and your children's children: The more things change the more they are the same.

Jane Wells (1886)
Submitted by Carol Abbs