Nathan > Nathan's Quotes

“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't.”
― Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World

“Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.”
― Albert Camus

“I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The road to hell is paved with adverbs.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.”
― C.S. Lewis

“The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them -- words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they're brought out. But it's more than that, isn't it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you've said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That's the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.”
― Stephen King

“If cats looked like frogs we'd realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That's what people remember.”
― Terry Pratchett, Lords and Ladies

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. And the people there see you differently, too. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

“A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“Don't be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don't have to live forever, you just have to live.”
― Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.”
― Mark Twain

“There are three things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
― George Orwell

“War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Two Towers

“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 man.”
― Mark Twain

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain

“All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his.”
― Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

“The trouble is not in dying for a friend, but in finding a friend worth dying for.”
― Mark Twain

“Science and religion are not at odds. Science is simply too young to understand.”
― Dan Brown, Angels & Demons

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

“I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

“And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

“I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.”
― C. S. Lewis

“If you don't know history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is part of a tree. ”
― Michael Crichton

“I am glad you are here with me. Here at the end of all things, Sam.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King