Quotes by Writers - Page 171

Every religion has extremists, and extremists have more in common with each other than they do with the common people of their faith.
Orli Matlow
Faith is the greatest magic of all.
Farah Oomerbhoy
Get up. Faith is the greatest magic of all. It can lift the world out of the darkness and bring it into the light. Be the Star of the Morning, the light that fills the world with magic. Be the Lightbringer, the Breaker of Shadows. Believe in yourself, Aurora Firedrake; believe in the Dawnstar. For if you have faith, anything is possible.
Farah Oomerbhoy
It was all bad, very bad. And the worst of it was not that they had ceased waiting, but that they had ceased to have faith.
Georgi Vladimov
The will to believe has given us our great saints. The will to doubt has given us our great scientists. The goal of the intelligent man is a character in which the will to believe of the saint and the will to doubt of the scientist meet and mingle.
Glenn Frank
It hardly matters how the body of Jesus came to be missing because in the last analysis what convinced the people that he had risen from the dead was not the absence of his corpse but his living presence. And so it has been ever since.
Frederick Buechner
You have two things of value: your monastery and your people. Translate the book for me, and I'll let you keep one. Which will it be?
Faith Erin Hicks
A man may indeed be an honest man; but the folly of sacrifice, of virginity, of devotedness, of martyrdom, arises only from faith in the folly of the Cross.
Emile Bougaud
I was utterly convinced that an intellectual could never be anything but an intellectual, was simply not capable of being anything else, that his intellectuality would, sooner or later, erode his faith or erode whatever he'd masked it with . . . For example, intellectuals like to dress themselves up as peasants . . . but it never works. The intellectual's constitution is impervious to such things - it permits only one object of worship - oneself. Generally speaking, an intellectual in the contemporary version is an exceptionally resourceful and, essentially, pitiful being.
Leonid Borodin
I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?
Dejan Stojanovic
Girls aside, the other thing I found in the last few years of being at school, was a quiet, but strong Christian faith – and this touched me profoundly, setting up a relationship or faith that has followed me ever since.I am so grateful for this. It has provided me with a real anchor to my life and has been the secret strength to so many great adventures since.But it came to me very simply one day at school, aged only sixteen.As a young kid, I had always found that a faith in God was so natural. It was a simple comfort to me: unquestioning and personal.But once I went to school and was forced to sit through somewhere in the region of nine hundred dry, Latin-liturgical, chapel services, listening to stereotypical churchy people droning on, I just thought that I had got the whole faith deal wrong.Maybe God wasn’t intimate and personal but was much more like chapel was … tedious, judgemental, boring and irrelevant.The irony was that if chapel was all of those things, a real faith is the opposite. But somehow, and without much thought, I had thrown the beautiful out with the boring. If church stinks, then faith must do, too.The precious, natural, instinctive faith I had known when I was younger was tossed out with this newly found delusion that because I was growing up, it was time to ‘believe’ like a grown-up.I mean, what does a child know about faith?It took a low point at school, when my godfather, Stephen, died, to shake me into searching a bit harder to re-find this faith I had once known.Life is like that. Sometimes it takes a jolt to make us sit and remember who and what we are really about.Stephen had been my father’s best friend in the world. And he was like a second father to me. He came on all our family holidays, and spent almost every weekend down with us in the Isle of Wight in the summer, sailing with Dad and me. He died very suddenly and without warning, of a heart attack in Johannesburg.I was devastated.I remember sitting up a tree one night at school on my own, and praying the simplest, most heartfelt prayer of my life.‘Please, God, comfort me.’Blow me down … He did.My journey ever since has been trying to make sure I don’t let life or vicars or church over-complicate that simple faith I had found. And the more of the Christian faith I discover, the more I realize that, at heart, it is simple. (What a relief it has been in later life to find that there are some great church communities out there, with honest, loving friendships that help me with all of this stuff.)To me, my Christian faith is all about being held, comforted, forgiven, strengthened and loved – yet somehow that message gets lost on most of us, and we tend only to remember the religious nutters or the God of endless school assemblies.This is no one’s fault, it is just life. Our job is to stay open and gentle, so we can hear the knocking on the door of our heart when it comes.The irony is that I never meet anyone who doesn’t want to be loved or held or forgiven. Yet I meet a lot of folk who hate religion. And I so sympathize. But so did Jesus. In fact, He didn’t just sympathize, He went much further. It seems more like this Jesus came to destroy religion and to bring life.This really is the heart of what I found as a young teenager: Christ comes to make us free, to bring us life in all its fullness. He is there to forgive us where we have messed up (and who hasn’t), and to be the backbone in our being.Faith in Christ has been the great empowering presence in my life, helping me walk strong when so often I feel so weak. It is no wonder I felt I had stumbled on something remarkable that night up that tree.I had found a calling for my life.
Bear Grylls
So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort; knowledge is obvious. Faith assumes effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.
Evgenij Vodolazkin
You are all soldiers of Christ," he said, "and now is an opportunity given to you to show that you are worthy soldiers. When the troops of a worldly monarch go into battle they do so with head erect, with proud and resolute bearing, with flashing eye, and with high courage, determined to bear aloft his banner and to crown it with victory, even though it cost them their lives. Such is the mien that soldiers of Christ should bear in the mortal strife now raging round us. Let them show the same fearlessness of death, the same high courage, the same unlimited confidence in their Leader. What matter if they die in His service? He has told them what their work should be. He has bidden them visit the sick and comfort the sorrowing. What if there be danger in the work? Did He shrink from the Cross which was to end His work of love, and is it for His followers to do so? 'Though you go down into the pit,' He has said, 'I am there also'; and with His companionship one must be craven indeed to tremble. This is a noble opportunity for holding high the banner of Christ. There is work to be done for all, and as the work is done, men should see by the calm courage, the cheerfulness, and the patience of those that do it, that they know that they are doing His work, and that they are content to leave the issue, whatever it be, in His hands.
G.A. Henty
Faith is not knowledge of an object but communion with it.
Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.
Frederick Buechner
Hit ain't sacrilege. Miss Effie Belle says when she cain't think what to have for dinner, she asts God and right off He gives her an idea. To my thinkin', thet's sacrilege."Miss Love really laughed. "There's not a woman in the world who hasn't prayed what to cook for dinner, Rucker!
Olive Ann Burns
To the knights of faith nobody believes.
Dejan Stojanovic
Our forgiving love toward men is the evidence of God's forgiving love in us. It is a necessary condition of the prayer of faith.
Andrew Murray
Religious people tend to encounter, among those who are not, a cemented certainty that belief in God is a crutch for the weak and the fearful...Now the belief in God may turn out at the last trump to be a mistake. Meantime, let us be quite clear, it is not merely the comfort of the simple--though it is that too, much to its glory--it is a formidable intellectual position with which most of the first-class minds of the human race, century in and century out, have concurred, each in his own way....speaking of crutches--Freud can be a crutch, Marx can be a crutch, rationalism can be a crutch, and atheism can be two canes and a pair of iron braces. We none of us have all the answers, nor are we likely to have. But in the country of the halt, the man who is surest he has no limp may be the worst-crippled.
Herman Wouk
Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith....Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith.
Saul D. Alinsky
Спомням си как през летните следобеди, които прекарвах там, баба ми, привършила домашната работа, сядаше до прозореца на светло и вадеше от своя скришен сандък една огромна Библия с твърди корици, обвита с тогавашния официозен вестник "Работническо дело" по конспиративни причини. Вече знаех, че комунизмът и Библията никак не се обичаха.
Georgi Gospodinov
My faith in the expertise of physicists like Richard Feynman, for instance, permits me to endorse—and, if it comes to it, bet heavily on the truth of—a proposition that I don't understand. So far, my faith is not unlike religious faith, but I am not in the slightest bit motivated to go to my death rather than recant the formulas of physics. Watch: E doesn't equal mc2, it doesn't, it doesn't! I was lying, so there!
Daniel C. Dennett
You don't get to advertise all the good that your religion does without first scrupulously subtracting all the harm it does and considering seriously the question of whether some other religion, or no religion at all, does better.
Daniel C. Dennett
I must confess that I lost faith in the sanity of the world
H.G.Wells
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake and moving.
Frederick Buechner
Faith is, at one and the same time, absolutely necessary and altogether impossible.
Stanisław Lem
A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.
Alan W. Watts
Go where your best prayers take you.
Frederick Buechner
Faith consists in believing what reason cannot.
Voltaire
You can never really know someone completely. That’s why it’s the most terrifying thing in the world, really—taking someone on faith, hoping they’ll take you on faith too. It’s such a precarious balance, It’s a wonder we do it at all. And yet..
Libba Bray
To have faith is to trust yourself to the water. When you swim you don't grab hold of the water, because if you do you will sink and drown. Instead you relax, and float.
Alan W. Watts
It comes down to this: we're pieces of equipmentTo be counted and signed for. On occasion some of us break down,And those parts which can't be salvagedAre replaced with other GI parts, that's all.
Rolando Hinojosa
As Henry Moore carvedor modelled his sculpture every day,he strove to surpass Donatello4. and failed, but woke the next morningelated for another try.
Donald Hall
Nobody can tell you about that sword all that there is to be told of it; for those that know of those paths of Space on which its metals once floated, till Earth caught them one by one as she sailed past on her orbit, have little time to waste on such things as magic and so cannot tell you how the sword was made, and those who know whence poetry is, and the need that man has for song, or know any one of the fifty branches of magic, have little time to waste on such things as science, and so cannot tell you whence its ingredients came. Enough that it was once beyond our Earth and was now here amongst our mundane stones; that it was once but as those stones, and now had something in it such as soft music has; let those that can define it.
Lord Dunsany
Les rêves sont seuls les réalités de la vie.
Xavier Forneret
Ah! The anguish, the vile rage, the despairOf not being able to expressWith a shout, an extreme and bitter shout,The bleeding of my heart.
Fernando Pessoa
He [the poet] brings out the inner part of things and presents them to men in such a way that they cannot refuse but must accept it. But how the mere choice and rhythm of words should produce so magical an effect no one has yet been able to comprehend, and least of all the poets themselves.
Hilaire Belloc
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold;The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.
Robert W. Service
It is not growing like a treeIn bulk, doth make Man better be;Or standing long an oak, three hundred year,To fall a log at last, dry, bald, and sere:A lily of a dayIs fairer far in MayAlthough it fall and die that night;It was the plant and flower of Light.In small proportions we just beauties see;And in short measures life may perfect be (Ben Jonson)
Aidan Chambers
Know that there is often hidden in us a dormant poet, always young and alive.
Paul de Musset
Wer ein Theater füllen will, bedient sich der Dramaturgie. Um es zu leeren genügt Ideologie.
Oliver Hassencamp
The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.
Aldous Huxley
The skies bend, the time stops, the lanes move and the fires dance,It can mean only one thing that I am with you.You are enigmatic yet so beautiful that I have lost my sense, You are as immaculate as the unadulterated morning dew And your beauty leaves me in a mystified trance.I do not foresee what you and I will beBut I promise to be with you till the rocks keep meeting the sea.
Faraaz Kazi
Mi táctica es mirarte aprender como sos quererte como sosmi táctica es hablarte y escucharte construir con palabras un puente indestructiblemi táctica es quedarme en tu recuerdo no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto pero quedarme en vosmi táctica es ser franco y saber que sos franca y que no nos vendamos simulacros para que entre los dosno haya telón ni abismosmi estrategia es en cambio más profunda y más simple mi estrategia es que un día cualquiera no sé cómo ni sé con qué pretexto por fin me necesites
Mario Benedetti Táctica y estrategia
Outside our small safe place flies mystery.
A.S. Byatt
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
Robert W. Service
Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world — Los Angeles in the '50s — they made perfect sense.
Wanda Coleman
the poet I saw once...but whose words have long beenin my mind, windows of invincible candles...
Nathalie Handal
Mon Dieu, la vie est par trop moche.
Aldous Huxley
Only times and places, only names and ghosts.
Aldous Huxley
On No Work of WordsOn no work of words now for three lean months in the bloodyBelly of the rich year and the big purse of my bodyI bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:To take to give is all, return what is hungrily givenPuffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.To lift to leave from the treasures of man is pleasing deathThat will rake at last all currencies of the marked breathAnd count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seasIf I take to burn or return this world which is each man's work.
Dylan Thomas
Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.
A.S. Byatt
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
Dylan Thomas
Compañera usted sabe que puede contar conmigo no hasta dos o hasta diez sino contar conmigosi alguna vez advierte que la miro a los ojos y una veta de amor reconoce en los míos no alerte sus fusiles ni piense qué delirio a pesar de la veta o tal vez porque existe usted puede contar conmigosi otras veces me encuentra huraño sin motivo no piense qué flojera igual puede contar conmigopero hagamos un trato yo quisiera contar con usted es tan lindo saber que usted existe uno se siente vivo y cuando digo esto quiero decir contar aunque sea hasta dos aunque sea hasta cinco no ya para que acuda presurosa en mi auxilio sino para saber a ciencia cierta que usted sabe que puede contar conmigo
Mario Benedetti Hagamos un trato
I am a student of life, and don't want to miss any experience. There's poetry in this sort of thing, you know--or perhaps you don't know, but it's all the same.
H.P. Lovecraft
Have you suffered, starved and triumphed, grovelled down, yet grasped at glory,Grown bigger in the bigness of the whole? 'Done things' just for the doing, letting babblers tell the story,Seeing through the nice veneer the naked soul? Have you seen God in His splendours, heard the text that nature renders?(You'll never hear it in the family pew.) The simple things, the true things, the silent men who do things–Then listen to the wild–it's calling you.
Robert W. Service
I never paid any attention to people who told me to go out and live. I belonged always to whatever was far from me and to whatever I could never be. Anything that was not mine, however base, always seemed to me to be full of poetry. The only thing I ever loved was pure nothingness.
Fernando Pessoa
Man would not be man if his dreams did not exceed his grasp. ... Like John Donne, man lies in a close prison, yet it is dear to him. Like Donne's, his thoughts at times overleap the sun and pace beyond the body. If I term humanity a slime mold organism it is because our present environment suggest it. If I remember the sunflower forest it is because from its hidden reaches man arose. The green world is his sacred center. In moments of sanity he must still seek refuge there. ... If I dream by contrast of the eventual drift of the star voyagers through the dilated time of the universe, it is because I have seen thistledown off to new worlds and am at heart a voyager who, in this modern time, still yearns for the lost country of his birth.
Loren Eiseley
The poets are supposed to liberate the words – not chain them in phrases. Who told the poets they were supposed to think? Poets are meant to sing and to make words sing. Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody? 'Your very own words,' indeed! And who are you?
Brion Gysin
Isn't joyful or painful this pain in which I rejoice
Fernando Pessoa