"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous, he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and a man." - Mark Twain
"If God lived on earth, people would break His windows." - Yiddish proverb
Jed Clampett: "Pearl, what d'ya think? Think I oughta move? Cousin Pearl: "Jed, how can ya even ask? Look around ya. You're eight miles from yore nearest neighbor. Yore overrun with skunks, possums, coyotes, bobcats. You use kerosene lamps fer light and you cook on a wood stove summer and winter. Yore drinkin' homemade moonshine and washin' with homemade lye soap. And yore bathroom is fifty feet from the house and you ask, 'Should I move?' Jed: "I reckon yore right. A man'd be a dang fool to leave all this!" - The Beverly Hillbillies
"Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it." - George MacDonald
"To believe in the supernatural is not simply to believe that after living a successful, material, and fairly virtuous life here one will continue to exist in the best-possible substitute for this world, or that after living a starved and stunted life here one will be compensated with all the good things one has gone without: it is to believe that the supernatural is the greatest reality here and now." - T. S. Eliot
"Good men use the world to enjoy God, whereas bad men use God to enjoy the world." - Augustine
"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people." - G. K. Chesterton
"It would be even worse to think of those who get what they pray for as a sort of court favorites, people who have influence with the throne. The refused prayer of Christ in Gethsemane is answer enough to that...Does God then forsake just those who serve Him best? Well, He who served Him best of all said, near His tortured death, 'Why hast Thou forsaken Me?' When God becomes man, that Man, of all others, is least comforted by God, at His greatest need. There is a mystery here which, even if I had the power, I might not have the courage to explore. Meanwhile, little people like you and me, if our prayers are sometimes granted, beyond all hope of probability, had better not draw hasty conclusions to our own advantage. If we were stronger, we might be less tenderly treated. If we were braver, we might be sent, with far less help, to defend far more desperate posts in the battle." - C. S. Lewis, from "The Efficacy of Prayer," in The World's Last Night & Other Essays
"Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves. Thus without Scripture, whose only object is Christ, we know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature itself." - Blaise Pascal
Thu,May 4 2006 05:17:27 AM
"On Human Justice: "When everything is moving at once, nothing appears to be moving, as on board a ship. When everyone is moving toward depravity, no one seems to be moving, but if someone stops he show up the others who are rushing on, by acting as a fixed point.""
–Blaise