Words from some Wise Guys

Let me share some quotes my dad sent me recently. I think they came from his recent reading of P. Yancey. It's great to have grown up in a home with books and readers and parents who valued good manners & and good grammar.

"A saint is one who exaggerates what the world neglects."
--G. K. Chesterton

"Love consents to all and commands only those who consent. Love is abdication. God is abdication".
--Simone Weil

"The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever, will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous, and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Faith does not...spring from the miracle, but the miracle from faith."
--Fyodor Dostoevsky

"This again is a great contradiction: though he was a Jew, his followers were not Jews."
---Voltaire

"Suppose we hear an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair.
One explanation....would be that he might be an odd shape.
But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape....Perhaps [in short] this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Why did Providence hide it's face at the most critical moment ... as though voluntarily submitting to the blind, dumb, pitiless laws of nature?"
---Fyodor Dostoevsky

"The quality of mercy is not strained.
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven...
And earthly power doth then show likest God's when mercy seasons justice."
--Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Comments