Quotes by British Authors - Page 740

If, in the quiet of your heart, you feel something should be done, stop and consider whether it is in line with the character and teaching of Jesus. If so, obey that impulse to do it, and in doing so you will find it was God guiding you.
Eric Liddell
In fighting those who serve devils one always his this on one's side; their Masters hate them as much as they hate us. The moment we disable the human pawns enough to make them useless to Hell, their own Masters finish the work for us. they break their tools.
C.S. Lewis
Utter frustration often precedes the breakthrough so stick with it and have faith in your journey.
Sam Owen
When you let it get personal, the cost becomes personal too. You’re opening your own heart here. You sure you want to do that?”“I’d do it for free. For the bullshit you are, and have always been.”“Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.
Michael Marshall Smith
Disbelief is easy, Kane. It’s faith that takes courage, and character.
Michael Marshall Smith
It is through experience that I have lost faith in USA law enforcement.
Steven Magee
Zeal was like gas, most dangerous when you could not see it. The wrong spark could light it at any time.
Frances Hardinge
For the first time in my life, I'm doubting my faith, and it terrifies me.For the first time, I want to change the rules. For the first time I wonder: does it matter what it says on your skin, when what's at stake is your soul?
Alice Broadway
Wherever there is ‘faith’ without regeneration it has to be that the uncured enmity of the natural man to spiritual things remains.
Iain H. Murray
....let me tell you that the one sin I have come to fear more than any other is certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end........Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty, and if there was no doubt, there would be no mystery, and therefore no need for faith.
Robert Harris
You came to me asking how my faith survived the Day of Judgement. I will tell you a secret. When the stars fell, when the seas boiled and the earth burned, my faith didn’t die. That is when I began to believe.God was real, and he hated us.
Aaron Dembski-Bowden
… Science is constantly proved all the time. You see, if we take something like any fiction, any holy book… and destroyed it, in a thousand years’ time, that wouldn’t come back just as it was. Whereas if we took every science book, and every fact, and destroyed them all, in a thousand years they’d all be back, because all the same tests would [produce] the same result.
Ricky Gervais
If asked, ‘Do you believe in ghosts or the supernatural?’, I can only answer somewhat as follows. I do believe in another world which penetrates this, and that, as Milton so aptly puts it, ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth/Unseen, both when we wake, and when we sleep’, I deplore the false Cartesian split as a dreadful blow to the human mind. To me, the world of imagination, which works by means of analogy, is as real, in its own particular way, as the everyday external world. To me, the myths are vital truths, the gods and goddesses still live, on that mighty archetypal plane which lies beyond our little selves and yet within our being, too. Now this may appear illogical, a tangled web of contradictions. To believe in every spiritual truth, in all religions and all creeds, to revere a single God and the many? This may disturb the theologian, but not the Mystic. For, to the mystical turn of mind, the One may become the Many, the Many One. Spiritual and poetic truth—the transcendental vision, that is—encompasses both reason and ethics, yet soars above them.
Harvey Peter Sucksmith
The answer to most prayers is no.
Alex George
The truth is I don’t know what happens to the spirits of the dead when they leave this world. Priests may claim to, even Truthseeker may claim to. However nobody truly knows. All Truthseeker truly knows is that Ishar, Kirfell, Orion and Avanti are lies. He has no proof of an alternative. I don’t know. There may be nothing beyond this dark reality we live in, but that doesn’t feel right to me. We love, we hate, we fight, we strive... People’s lives seem too complex and important to be simply extinguished like a candle.’~Vexis ZaelwarshDeathsworn Arc 5: The Temple of the Mad God
Martyn Stanley
Numbers 12: 6 - 8When there is a prophet among you, I, the Lord, reveal myself to them in visions, I speak to them in dreams. But this is not true of my servant Moses; he is faithful in all my house. With him I speak face to face, clearly and not in riddles; he sees the form of the Lord.So, unless you're Moses, this verse makes it obvious that God will not always speak clearly. Often he speaks softly and in riddles. He will reveal something supernaturally to us, but it's always something we need to pay close attention to. We usually need to then carefully interpret and apply what we hear. We are convinced that God's motivation behind this - as with all he does - is to draw us into relationship.
Mike Pilavachi
Child, [death] is with us always,” said Cadfael, patient beside him. “Last summer ninety-five men died here in the town, none of whom had done murder. For choosing the wrong side, they died. It falls upon blameless women in war, even in peace at the hands of evil men. It falls upon children who never did harm to any, upon old men, who in their lives have done good to many, and yet are brutally and senselessly slain. Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.” “Such justice as we see is also but a broken shred. But it is our duty to preserve what we may, and fit together such fragments as we find, and take the rest on trust.
Ellis Peters
His faith was like the radar of a bat, it took him through the darkness that surrounded him. It would guide him through everything that evil would throw at him. When his body gave up, God’s powers lifted him up and kept his heart thumping.
Mark A. Cooper
Lucas couldn’t have imagined that he would have ever felt so alone. No family, no friends. Even his own village had turned against him. He peered into the icy water; it looked like it was about to freeze over. Maybe I should drown myself before I freeze to death? he pondered. Was there no one to help? He instinctively bowed his head and prayed. A warm feeling engulfed his battered body. “I’m not alone, I will never be alone. God is with me,” he blubbered.
Mark A. Cooper
Tell me, son... have you ever been intimidated by anyone?''Oh yes,' said Thomas. 'I don't believe it. By whom?''By Our Lord... on the altar.
Louis de Wohl
The decline in the influence of religion has been due, in the main, not to religion itself, but to the very shallowness of many practitioners. People who are indoctrinated and mistake implanted obsession for faith, are themselves destroyers of the very thing which they imagine themselves called upon to try to protect.In fact, of course, they have no such call: and their capacity to protect something which is other than their imaginings makes for a comical situation.
Idries Shah
For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism.
Alister E. McGrath
Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more than this - not contradicting, but transcending reason.
Alister E. McGrath
You've asked enough questions about evil. But you never asked once about love."So I asked him to tell me about it, but of course his definition lay beyond words. He just went on sitting with me in the dark and taking the weight of my pain.
Susan Howatch
On the other hand, if God's moral judgement differs from ours so that our 'black' may be His 'white', we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say 'God is good', while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say 'God is we know not what'. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) 'good' we shall obey, if at all, only through fear - and should be equally ready to obey omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity - when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing - may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.- The Problem of Pain, pp. 28 - 29
C.S. Lewis
Man can have faith without religion, but religion cannot have faith without man.
Anthony T.Hincks
Jericho lowered himself carefully to his knees. He covered his eyes and moved his lips like all the others, but he had no faith in any of it. Faith in mathematics, yes; faith in logic, of course; faith in the trajectory of the stars, yes, perhaps. But faith in a God, Christian or otherwise?
Robert Harris
You could say I lost my faith in science and progressYou could say I lost my belief in the holy ChurchYou could say I lost my sense of directionYou could say all of this and worse, ...Some would say I was a lost man in a lost worldYou could say I lost my faith in the people on TVYou could say I'd lost my belief in our politiciansThey all seemed like game show hosts to me...I never saw no miracle of scienceThat didn't go from a blessing to a curseI never saw no military solutionThat didn't always end up as something worse--Excerpts from "If I Ever Lose My Faith In You
Sting
Stand like a beaten anvil, when thy dreamIs laid upon thee, golden from the fire.Flinch not, though heavily through that furnace-gleamThe black forge-hammers fall on thy desire.Demoniac giants round thee seem to loom.'Tis but the world-smiths heaving to and fro.Stand like a beaten anvil. Take the doomTheir ponderous weapons deal thee, blow on blow.Needful to truth as dew-fall to the flowerIs this wild wrath and this implacable scorn.For every pang, new beauty, and new power,Burning blood-red shall on thy heart be born.Stand like a beaten anvil. Let earth's wrongBeat on that iron and ring back in song.
Alfred Noyes
Christianity is not a doctrine, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For 'consciousness of sin' is a real event an so are despair and salvation through faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The fear of the crowd then came to Will, with the taste of a copper penny placed on his tongue; and it was not the fear that they were under divine judgement, but that they were not, and could never be.
Sarah Perry
As time passed, I began to get depressed and cried a lot. It was not because of my pregnancy. Praise the Lord, I wasn't having any more morning sickness, and I remained in good health, but my emotions were taking a nosedive. In my present situation, I was so isolated, and so lonely, and when a woman is pregnant, she doesn't feel pretty any more. In fact, she often feels ugly and awkward.
Helen Goldie
I had just prayed, Oh God, please help me! I want to serve you, but I don't know how. I don't know what to do? ------ "WRITE A BOOK!" I was in shock. So, I stood silent, in wonderment. I was surprised that I had received an answer to my prayer. I didn't really expect to hear from God. Why should I? I was nobody, only a little dot on the earth. Why should the Great God of the universe speak to me?
Helen Goldie
Archie had exciting news for me one day, ---He had just been to Washington and The Baptist World Alliance wanted him to become their Baptist World Aid Secretary. --- What a challenge, what an opportunity, what a frightening, impossible job, I thought all at once. Then a still, small voice within me reminded me: "With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible." Matt. 1926
Helen Goldie
Ten thousand people were baptized in the Han river in Seoul, Korea. Imagine! 10,000 people giving their lives to Christ at one time! I will never forget it! ----I felt that the constant prayers of the Korean people had made the difference. I think we in the west should take prayer more seriously.
Helen Goldie
He would cry out, stretch his back in an arch, and his eyes would roll back in his head, and I was terrified that I would lose him before reaching the hospital. I kept crying out to God to save my boy. "Please, Lord! Please, Lord! Don't let him die!
Helen Goldie
On the Day of Judgment , life and death are not determined by the world but by God's wisdom and law
John Bunyan
There is of course a deep spiritual need which the pilgrimage seems to satisfy, particularly for those hardy enough to tackle the journey on foot.
Edwin Mullins
Believe in something important. Pursue it wholeheartedly.
Fennel Hudson
It was wrong to be so joyless, so desponding; I should have made God my friend, and to do His will the pleasure and the business of my life; but faith was weak, and passion was too strong.
Anne Brontë
I know who you are. My father told me stories about you. He talked about your hands- hands that created the world surrendered to cruel nails
G.P. Taylor
It is of the very nature of partial seeing that we cannot see all the reconciliation of the parts we see, because it is only in the whole that they are one, and we do not see the whole. The word we form cannot wholly express God: only the Word He generates can do that. To be irked at this necessary darkness is as though we were irked at not being God.
Frank Sheed
I know who you are. My father told me stories about you. He talked about your hands-hands that created the world surrendered to cruel nails
G.P. Taylor
They are all dead now, Diocletian and Ignatius, Cyril and Hypatia, Julian and Basil, Athanasius and Arîus: every party has yielded up its persecutors and its martyrs, its hates and slanders and aspirations and heroisms, to the arms of that great Silence whose secrets they all claimed so loudly to have read. Even the dogmas for which they fought might seem to be dead too. For if Julian and Sallustius, Gregory and John Chrysostom, were to rise again and see the world as it now is, they would probably feel their personal differences melt away in comparison with the vast difference between their world and this. They fought to the death about this credo and that, but the same spirit was in all of them.
Gilbert Murray
Even in an empty room, we are never alone.
Wayne Gerard Trotman
Dad?" Jesus asked."Yes son?" God replied."Why does man have so many religions?" Jesus asked."It's because they all have different beliefs," God said."Why?" Jesus asked."It's because they have a free mind. It's up to them to choose what they wish to believe in," God said."But, what if they forget about you?" Jesus asked his dad.God replied, "Even though they may forget about me, they will always remember me. Would you ever forget me?" God asked."Never!" said Jesus, "How could I ever forget my father?""Exactly! And so it is for them," God added.
Anthony T.Hincks
I'd always thought it was gaudy, but standing there watching him beside the gold and glass shrine, I realised that his was a candlelight faith. It didn't work in the clear unforgiving light in London or Scandinavia, where even the dust in the cathedrals showed. But in the warm dimness and the shadows, what would have been tasteless at home made sense. The shrine looked like an oil painting made into real substance. So did he. England's was a reading religion, one it was difficult to understand at the bleak unimpressive first glance, one that needed books to explain itself. But his was images and images, the same as the old stages, in a place where not everyone could read and good light was expensive.
Natasha Pulley
Buddha lets me see the world in color so that I can appreciate its color.Just as God too lets you see the color of beauty in the world.And so too with Allah because he lets you see the beauty in everything.....I cannot begin to understand all religions, but I know one thing.Color brings love into our world regardless of who we are; what we preach or what we believe in.And to me, that is the only truth that I know.
Anthony T.Hincks
When you have faith in yourself, the possibilities are endless.
Anthony T.Hincks
Faith can never be lost.It can only be misplaced.
Anthony T.Hincks
The madness of faith is a very different thing from the madness of Enlightenment Reason.
Adam Roberts
Monogamy is faith in the faithless
Virginia Alison
It is not great faith but true faith that saves. And the salvation lies not in the faith but in the Christ in whom faith trusts.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
Let it be admitted at once, mournful as the admission is, that every instinct in his intelligence went out at first to greet the new light. It had hardly done so, when a recollection of the opening chapter of 'Genesis' checked it at the outset.
Edmund Gosse
Through faith we find peace And above allIt is in loving that we find life
Mimi Novic
Maladict had hallucinations, but Wazzer had a certainty you could bend steel around. It was the opposite of a hallucination, somehow. It was as if she could see what was real and you couldn't.
Terry Pratchett
What the ultra-conservative (or the merely timid and compliant) fail to realize is that a Christianity which wields its moral and dogmatic authority like a hammer actually sows despair in the hearts of the faithful to the point where faith is destroyed.
Angela Tilby
In this nonfundamentalist understanding of faith, practice is more important than theory, love more important than law, and mystery is seen as an insight into truth rather than an obstacle. It is the great lie of our time that all religious faith has to be fundamentalist to be valid.
Andrew Sullivan
Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith." (Br. Cadfael)
Ellis Peters
A life which has never been laid open in penitence and faith before God has little permanence in eternity.
R.K. Harrison