Chase after truth like hell and you'll free yourself, even though you never touch its coat-tails.
-- Clarence Darrow
It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a skeptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?"
-- G.K. Chesterton
Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired: the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.
-- Francis Bacon
Christianity has the opportunity, therefore, to speak clearly of the fact that its answer has the very thing that modern man has despaired of -- unity of thought. It provides a unified answer for the whole of life. It is true that man will have to renounce his rationalism, but then, on the basis of what can be discussed, he has the possibility of recovering his rationality.
-- Francis Schaeffer
And our view of final reality -- whether it is material-energy, shaped by impersonal chance, or the living God and Creator -- will determine our position on every crucial issue we face today. It will determine our views on the value and dignity of people, the base for the kind of life the individual and society lives, the direction law will take, and whether there will be freedom or some form of authoritarian dominance.
-- Francis Schaeffer
Alone you stood before God when God called you. Alone you had to obey God's voice. Alone you had to take up your cross, struggle, and pray and alone you will die and give an account to God. You cannot avoid yourself, for it is precisely God who has singled you out. If you do not want to be alone, you are rejecting Christ's call to you, and you can have no part in the community of those who are called ... But the reverse is also true. Whoever cannot stand being in community should beware of being alone. You are called into the community of faith, the wall was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The church is only the church when it exists for others.
-- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Unless Thou show us Thine own true way no man can find it; father! Thou must lead.
-- Michelangelo
I obey Thee, Lord, first for the love I, in all reason, owe Thee; secondly, because Thou can shorten or prolong the lives of men.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
You think that the body is a wonderful work. In reality this is nothing compared to the soul that inhabits in that structure ... It is the work of God.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
The works of God are appreciated best by other creators.
-- Leonardo Da Vinci
God, who ordains all for the best, however strange it may appear to our eyes ...
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
I have concluded the evident existence of God, and that my existence depends entirely on God in all the moments of my life, that I do not think that the human spirit may know anything with greater evidence and certitude.
-- Rene Descartes
All other religions are indirect. Their founder sets himself aside and introduces another in his place ... Christianity only is a direct expression (I am the truth).
-- Soren Kierkegaard
(The Bible) is in my opinion the most sublime of all books; when all others will bore me, I will always go back to it with new pleasure; and when all human consolations will be lacking, never have I vainly turned to its own.
-- Jean Jacques Rousseau
All nature cries to us that He exists, that there is a Supreme Intelligence, a power immense, an order admirable, and all teaches us our dependence.
-- Voltaire
I defend the Good God against the idea of a continuous game of dice.
-- Albert Einstein
When I reflect on so many profoundly marvellous things that persons have grasped, sought, and done I recognize even more clearly that human intelligence is a work of God, and one of the most excellent.
-- Galileo
One should believe in God; if one does not have faith, though, its place should not be taken by sound and fury but by seeking and more seeking, seeking alone, face to face with one's conscience.
-- Anton Chekhov
It now shows itself ethical and practical. We learn that God IS; that He is in me; and that all things are shadows of Him.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
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 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 patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
-- C.S. Lewis
There was a man born among these Jews who claimed to be, or to be the son of, or to be "one with," the Something which is at once the awful haunter of nature and the giver of the moral law. The claim is so shocking -- a paradox, and even a horror, which we may easily be lulled into taking too lightly -- that only two views of this man are possible. Either he was a raving lunatic of an unusually abominable type, or else He was, and is, precisely what He said. There is no middle way. If the records make the first hypothesis unacceptable, you must submit to the second. And if you do that, all else that is claimed by Christians becomes credible -- that this Man, having been killed, was yet alive, and that His death, in some manner incomprehensible to human thought, has effected a real change in our relations to the "awful" and "righteous" Lord, and a change in our favor.
-- C.S. Lewis
Well, I don't think that this is it, you know -- this life ain't nothing ... If you believe in this world, you're stuck; you really don't have a chance. You'll go mad, 'cause you won't see the end of it. You may want to stick around, but you won't be able to.
-- Bob Dylan
Jesus was a human being, a Jew in Galilee with a name and a family, a person who was in a way just like everyone else. Yet in another way he was something different than anyone who had ever lived on earth before.
-- Philip Yancey
As I look back on my own pilgrimage, marked by wanderings, detours, and dead ends, I see now that what pulled me along was my search for grace. I rejected the church for a time because I found so little grace there. I returned because I found grace nowhere else.
-- Philip Yancey
Do Christians have anything to learn from someone who rejected our faith? I had concluded yes. Although Gandhi never accepted the claims of Christian theology, he based his life philosophy on principles learned from Jesus. In an odd sort of way, the impact of his life helped convince me of the truth of the Christian faith.
-- Philip Yancey
When you say there is evil, aren't you admitting there is good? When you accept the existence of goodness, you must affirm a moral law on the basis of which to differentiate between good and evil. But when you admit to a moral law, you must posit a moral lawgiver ... For if there is no moral lawgiver, there is no moral law. If there is no moral law, there is no good. If there is no good, there is no evil.
-- Ravi Zacharias
We must be those who have a great interest in creativity. Whether it is creativity from Christians or non-Christians, all people (saved and unsaved) are made in the image of God, all people are worth the respect that that statement accords them, all people's creative endeavors should interest us... each of us should have a great interest in both what God has made and what man makes as one of God's creatures, and therefore an expression of God himself. Christians should be those least threatened of all by new artistic ideas, by experimentation, by taking risks, by looking at and enjoying what the other side has to say. If indeed our feet are solidly rooted on truth itself, we are those who can look the world in the eye with confidence, pleasure, fulfillment. Christians should do more, not less. The less and narrower we become, the more "spiritual," often the less we can truly accomplish.
-- Franky Schaeffer
When Jesus designated his disciples "friends" (John 15:15) in that last extended conversation he had with them, he introduced a term that encouraged the continuing of the conversation. "Friend" sets us in a nonhierarchical, open, informal, spontaneous company of Jesus-friends, who verbally develop relationships of responsibility and intimacy by means of conversation. Characteristically, we do not make pronouncements to one another or look up texts by which to challenge one another; we simply talk out whatever feeling or thoughts are in our hearts as Jesus' friends.
-- Eugene Peterson
"How did you manage to make them cherish all this nothingness?" he asked the World-Hater.
"I simply make them embarrassed to admit that they are incomplete. A man would rather close his eyes than see himself as your Father-Spirit does. I teach them to exalt their emptiness and thus preserve the dignity of man."
"They need the dignity of God."
"You tell them that. I sell a cheaper product."
-- Calvin Miller
(quoted from published original and compiled resources)
