Anyway, here are the quotes:
Quotes from G.K. Chesterton, the most quotable English author:
"My chief objection to a quarrel is that it interrupts an argument."
"Neither modern science nor ancient religion believes in complete free thought. Theology rebukes certain thoughts by calling them blasphemous. Science rebukes certain thoughts by calling them morbid." Orthodoxy
"The cross cannot be defeated, for it is Defeat." The Ball and the Cross
"Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on."The Ball and the Cross
"Humility is the mother of giants. One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak." The Innocence of Father Brown
"'I am an atheist,' he said, in a stifled voice. 'I have always been an atheist. I am still an atheist.' Then, addressing the other's indolent and indifferent back, he cried: 'In God's name what do you mean?'
And the other answered without turning round: 'I mean nothing in God's name.'" The Ball and the Cross
"And he who will not climb the mountain of Christ does indeed fall into the abyss of Buddha." Saint Thomas Aquinas (which may be why some Christians have said that if they weren't Christians they would be Buddhists. I for one believe one of James Sire's implicit arguments in The Universe Next Door, that if I weren't a Christian, I would essentially be a nihilist.)
"The good painter has skill. It is the bad painter who loves his art. The good musician loves being a musician, the bad musician loves music." Tremendous Trifles
"The way to love anything is to realise that it might be lost." Tremendous Trifles ("You don't know about real loss, 'cause that only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much." - Sean Maguire in Good Will Hunting)
"[I]f you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all." Tremendous Trifles
"'Man,' I said, 'who are you that you should not believe in fairy tales?'" Tremendous Trifles
"Barbarians fear the unknown for the same reason that Agnostics worship it – because it is a fact." Tremendous Trifles
"Fairy tales... are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon." Tremendous Trifles
"... he who has most most sympathy with myths will most fully realise that they are not and never were a religion, in the sense that Christianity or even Islam is a religion.... though they provide a man with a calendar they do not provide him with a creed. A man did not stand up and say, "I believe in Jupiter and Juno and Neptune," etc., as he stands up and says 'I believe in God the Father Almighty.'" The Everlasting Man
"He did not talk about the books he had written; he was far too much alive for that. He talked about the books he had not written." Tremendous Trifles
"Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it." Tremendous Trifles
"We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough strength for play." Tremendous Trifles
"I had a notion of a man perpetually spinning round on one foot like a teetotum [a top] in the effort to find the world behind his beck which continually fled from him. Perhaps this is why the world goes round. Perhaps the world is always trying to look over its shoulder and catch up the world which always escapes it, yet without which it cannot be itself." Tremendous Trifles
Quotes from theological books:
"It is completely forgotten that if Christ had been only a man and had been regarded only a man by Peter, Peter would not have denied him."- Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity
"[T]o be a Christian, to truly belong to Christ – when Christ truly is who he claims to be – to be a Christian must indeed be the highest. humanly speaking, for a human being. And then that truly to be a Christian is to mean, in the world, to human eyes, to be the abased one, that it is to mean suffering every possible evil, every mockery and insult, and finally to be punished as a criminal!" - Soren Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity
"If the beauty of Christ and the beauty of the new creation is to be characterized as 'perfection,'...this must be... a perfection that can accommodate scars. The perfection of the kingdom of God is not the airbrushed sheen of the fashion magazine." - Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit
"Stories are lived before they are told–except in the case of fiction." Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, quoted in Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader
"The first task of Christian social ethics... is not to make the 'world' better or more just, but to help Christian people form their community consistent with their conviction that the story of Christ is ta truthful account of our existence. For as H.R. Niebuhr argued, only when we know 'what is going on,' do we know 'what we should do,' and Christians believe that we learn most decisively 'what is going on' in the cross and resurrection of Christ." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader
"Jesus' cross... is not merely a general symbol of moral significance of self-sacrifice... that it is better to give than receive. Rather, the cross is Jesus' ultimate dispossession through which God has conquered the powers of this world. The cross is not just a symbol of God's kingdom; it is that kingdom come." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader
"To be a disciple of Jesus is not enough to know the basic 'facts' of his life. It is not enough to know his story. Rather, to be a disciple of Jesus means that our lives must literally be taken up into the drama of God's redemption of this creation." - Stanley Hauerwas, The Hauerwas Reader
Miscellaneous quotes:
"Boredom is the self being stuffed with itself." - Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
"It is one thing to write The Sound and the Fury, to achieve the artistic transcendence of discerning meaning of the twentieth century, then to finish, then to find oneself at Reed's drugstore the next morning. A major problem... not solved but anaesthetized by alcohol.
It is something else to listen to a superb performance of Mozart's Twenty-first Piano Concerto, to come out at the end of it, to walk out into Columbus Circle afterwards. At best, a moderately sustained exaltation; at worst, a mild letdown." - Walker Percy, Lost in the Cosmos
"'This shall not be wasted,' he muttered, and hurled [a firkin of wine] against the nearest of his foes, crushing two of them and tripping up several others who fell over their bodies." - Frans G.Bengtsson, The Long Ships
"There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in." - Graham Greene, The Power and the Glory
"It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That's how the world is going to end." - William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
"In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you sleep, what are you." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
"My mother is a fish." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
"One day I was talking to Cora. She prayed for me because she believed I was blind to sin, wanting me to kneel and pray too, because people to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too." - Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
"I've studied now Philosophy/ And Jurisprudence, Medicine, - / And even, alas! Theology, -/ From end to end, with labor keen;/ And here, poor fool! with all my lore/ I stand, no wiser than before..." - Goethe, Faust (Faust's lament does not reflect my own thoughts. It just gave me a chuckle.)
"... [I]f we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called 'practical' men." - Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy
"O, come all you Roman Catholics/ That never went to mass..."- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (O, come all you Protestants/ Who never knew Luther.)
"–Are you annoyed? he asked.
–No, answered Stephen.
–Are you in bad humour?
–No.
–CREDO UT VOS SANGUINARIUS MENDAX ESTIS, said Cranly, QUIA FACIES VOSTRA MONSTRAT UT VOS IN DAMNO MALO HUMORE ESTIS." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"–PAX SUPER TOTUM SANGUINARIUM GLOBUM." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"–And is that why you will not communicate, Cranly asked, because you are not sure of that too, because you feel that the host, too, may be the body and blood of the son of God and not a wafer of bread? And because you fear that it may be?
–Yes, Stephen said quietly, I feel that and I also fear it.
–I see, Cranly said.
...
–I fear many things: dogs, fire-arms, the sea, thunder-storms, machinery, the country roads at night.
–But why do you fear a bit of bread?
–I imagine, Stephen said, that there is a malevolent reality behind those things I say I fear." - James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"'... I wonder what you think of Joyce, Father?'
The priest lifted his chair and pushed closer. 'You'll have to shout,' he said. 'Blind in one eye and deaf in one ear.'
'What do you think of Joyce?' Asbury said louder.
'Joyce? Joyce who?' asked the priest.
'James Joyce,' Asbury said and laughed.
The priest brushed his huge hand in the air as if he were bothered by gnats. 'I haven't met him,' he said." - Flannery O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill"
"'... Ask [God] to send the Holy Ghost.'
'The Holy Ghost?' Asbury said.
'Are you so ignorant you've never heard of the Holy Ghost?' the priest asked.
'Certainly I've heard of the Holy Ghost,' Asbury said furiously, 'and the Holy Ghost is the last thing I'm looking for!'
'And He may be the last thing you get,' the priest said..." - O'Connor, "The Enduring Chill" (archetypal O'Connor)
"I purposed in spirit when I mounted the ocean,/ I determined to do or die." Beowulf (quoted by an indecisive teenager)
"... gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe." - Albert Camus, The Stranger (The only primer on existential nihilism you'll ever need to read.)
This whole essay.
"But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that encahanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing." - A.A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner (I shed quite a few tears at the end of this book, many more than I did when I finished Winnie-the-Pooh. I felt a something similar at the end of Dead Poets Society, but Pooh Corner effects more a nostalgic longing.)
Quotes on stories, reading, and writing:
DONALD RAY POLLOCK: And so when I started out I also didn't know too much about how to begin, and so I would type out stories that I liked on a typewriter.
SCOTT SIMON: You mean type other stories out?
POLLOCK: Yes, type other writer's stories.You know, I'd never been in a writing workshop or anything and I–you know, it just seemed to be a way to get closer to figuring out how other writers did what they did. So I did that quite a bit.
...
SIMON: What would you learn by typing?
POLLOCK: I think one of the principal things I learned from typing the stories out was how dialog works. Also just, you know things about structure and you know, I could read a story, but I really wouldn't see how it worked until I got closer to it. (Dialogue quoted in Steven R. Guthrie, Creator Spirit. I once tried to do this, typing out short stories by other authors.)
"The poem is more something we find than something we make." - Mark Doty
"To read well, we must become as little children." - Peter Leithart, "Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader"
"Though fiction creates its own world, the book also is an objective presence in our world; the world becomes flesh and dwells among us, and the question must be asked whether this incarnate word is doing mischief or good." - Peter Leithart, "Authors, Authority, and the Humble Reader"
"The whole poetic or artistic or mythic phenomenon that we find when we look at the history of human imagination represents, I think the search for perfection.... We all have imaginings of it (some poets would urge that we have memories of it). Perfection hounds us remorselessly. It stands over against every experience we have of nostalgia, frustration, and desire....
Politics, medicine, ecology, and jurisprudence are our efforts to repair the damage.... When we've been allowed to take time from our plowing and fighting and brushing our teeth, we have tried to say something about perfection and our experience of the discrepancy that we feel between ourselves and perfection....
... We are driven by who knows what -- maybe it's the Holy Ghost -- to complain about this discrepancy, to oppose it, and to transcend it.... Myth is one version of this effort." - Thomas Howard (brother of Elisabeth Elliot), "Myth: Flight to Reality"
"... we have decided (sometime in the Renaissance it was and we finished the job in the eighteenth century) to recreate the world. It's a very small one now, limited as it is by microscopes and telescopes and computers, and asphalts parking lots at MacDonald's hamburger stands. And it's a horror. It is, above all, boring, for mystery has fled from it. We have announced to anyone who cares to listen -- and somehow one imagines that angels and elves aren't that enthralled by the information -- that we can explain everything....
By the eighteenth century the myth became sovereign that the analytic and rational capacity is absolutely adequate for unscrambling the mystery of the universe. Somewhere in the process the gods fled. The irony is that in the very effort of modern art to disentangle human experience from the transcendent, human experience turned to ashes." - Thomas Howard, "Myth: Flight to Reality"
"Once upon a time" is no time.... In reality... it means "at all times, in all places." - Erik Christian Haugaard, "Portrait of a Poet: Hans Christian Andersen and His Fairy Tales"
"God... sent the human race what I call good dreams. I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has given new life to men." - C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
"... if one only reads Great Books one can never know what a great, as opposed to an ordinary, book is..." - Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind
"But then I suppose that the converse must be true as well, that if one only reads ordinary books, one will never know what a Great Book is." - the author of this blog post
