Category Archives: Quotable

WISDOM FROM THOMAS CHALMERS

Love these! (HT: George Grant)

1. “The wider a man’s knowledge becomes, the deeper should be his humility; for the more he knows the more he sees of what remains unknown. The wider the diameter of light, the larger the circumference of darkness.”

2. “Regardless of how large, your vision is too small.”

3. “It is only through faith that we can find our way to love, and only through love that we can find our way to obedience.”

4. “Live with the high aim and purpose of one who is in training for eternity.”

5. “Gargantuanism and the care of souls cannot coexist.”

6. “Repentance is not one act of the mind; it is a course of acting by which we die daily unto sin.”

7. “Obstacles, setbacks, and difficulties are but opportunities for courage and tenacity. Great victories demand fierce resistance. Otherwise, they would not be great.”

8. “I would pray unto watching–and watch unto praying.”

9. “Let us standfast and contend earnestly for the faith once delivered; let us be manly and strenuous in the vindication thereof; and yet, let all our things be done with charity.”

10. “It is not by irregular efforts, however gigantic, that any great practical achievement is overtaken. It is by the constant recurrence and repetition of small efforts directed to a given object, and resolutely sustained and persevered in.”

11. “Let us be neither over-sanguine nor over-melancholy of immediate results. Our perspective of time is only slowly synchronized to the clock of providence.”

TRUE LEARNING IS THREATENING

One fears to plow through a new volume if there is a chance that a favorite landscape will be bulldozed in the process. One fears discovering a truth which will demand rethinking several views and changing the mind. One fears that somehow the knowledge will somehow negate the pleasures of naïvete.
Fred Craddock
HT: Allan Bevere 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2015/03/14/fred-craddock-by-allan-bevere/#ixzz3UmAoDVyZ

LITERATURE’S POWER

“I think the best psychologists are actually fiction writers,” Konnikova said. “Their understanding of the human mind is so far beyond where we’ve been able to get with psychology as a science.”

The narrow focus required by scientific research can miss the big picture, Konnikova said; researchers often tinker around the edges of wisdom elucidated by novelists a hundred years ago. “You need the careful experimentation, but you also need to take a step back and realize that fiction writers are seeing a broader vista and are capable of providing you with insights or even ideas for studies.”

The rest is here: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/33945/title/It-s-Elementary/

CHEW ON THIS!

“The vast accumulations of knowledge—or at least of information—deposited by the nineteenth century have been responsible for an equally vast ignorance. When there is so much to be known, when there are so many fields of knowledge in which the same words are used with different meanings, when every one knows a little about a great many things, it becomes increasingly difficult for anyone to know whether he knows what he is talking about or not. And when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”
T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood

(HT: Greg Thornbury)

WHAT IS CONSERVATISM?

“Roger Scruton succinctly captures the point in his book, How To Be A Conservative. ‘Conservatism starts from a sentiment that all mature people can readily share: the sentiment that good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’ In the name of justice, we too often get knee-jerk progressivism that erodes and destroys some of the best gifts handed down to us for tackling injustice. ‘The work of destruction,’ Scruton observes, ‘is quick, easy, and exhilarating; the work of creation is slow, laborious, and dull.’ But such creative conserving work is germane to securing the goods necessary for the poor to prosper.”

As quoted in James K.A. Smith’s article:

PERSISTENT DEFIANCE

“In this context, von Hildebrand offered an interesting insight into why opposition to Nazism was so hard. It was not because it was risky, though that was undoubtedly true. It was because it was tedious. To stand in opposition to something takes time and energy and yields little or no results and rarely brings immediate social credit (in fact, it typically brings the opposite). Sooner or later most people become tired of being indignant and simply accommodate themselves to what appears to be an invincible force. They may not privately approve but they publicly acquiesce.”

Carl Trueman

For the rest of this well-written and inspiring article see:

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2014/11/faith-truth-and-defiance

Dietrich von Hildebrand

GLORIOUS COMPLEXITY

“I have heard it said a thousand times that people seek out religion in order to escape complexity and uncertainty. I was moved and instructed precisely by the vast theater Edwards’s vision proposes for complexity and uncertainty, for a universe that is orderly without being mechanical, that is open to and participates in possibility, indeterminacy, and even providence. It taught me to think in terms that finally did some justice to the complexity of things.”

Pulitzer-prize winning author Marilynne Robinson