Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carol P. Christ

Throughout the years, many Christian women have told me of their great respect for the bravery and courage evident in my work, perhaps even gesturing to their own Isis earrings or a Nile River Goddess pendants.

C. S. Lewis

If you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body...every addition to that body enables Him to do more. If you want to help those outside you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ who along can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be a odd way of getting him to do more work.

C. S. Lewis

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."

C. S. Lewis

A perfect practice of Christianity would, of course, consist in a perfect imitation of the life of Christ -- I mean, in so far as it was applicable in one's own particular circumstance. Not in an idiotic sense -- it doesn't mean that every Christian should grow a beard, or be a bachelor, or become a travelling preacher. It means that every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God.

C. S. Lewis

Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?

C. S. Lewis

Theology is like a map. Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there, is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God--experiences compared with which many thrills of pious feelings you and I are likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly, if you want to get any further you must use the map.

C. S. Lewis

There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. […] There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves.[…]The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility.

C. S. Lewis

Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

C. S. Lewis

My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognise that the majority of the British people are not Christians and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members." --about the only statement i agree with in this book

Charles Caleb Colton

Posthumous charities are the very essence of selfishness when bequeathed by those who, even alive, would part with nothing.

Charles Caleb Colton

We must suit the flattery to the mind and taste of the recipient. We do not put essences into hogsheads, nor porter into phials. Delicate minds may be disgusted by compliments that would please a grosser intellect; as some fine ladies who would be shocked at the idea of a dram will not refuse a liqueur.

Charles Spurgeon

The old, old gospel is the newest thing in the world; in its very essence it is for ever good news.

Ang Lee

The source of all the material comes from nothingness, illusion is working more on things you can prove. That's the principle, the essence of life, it is actually an illusion, not immaterial. That's worth pursuing. So illusion is not nothing. In a way, that is the truth.

Diane Wakoski

... poetry is one of the essential structures of civilization -- carrying myth, ritual, 'tales of the tribe' and the essence of language ...

Catherine Drinker Bowen

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

Cary Grant

Simplicity, to me, has always been the essence of good taste.

Jane Austen

Could there be finer symptoms? Is not general incivility the very essence of love?

Janis Joplin

What we've had to do is learn to control success, put it in perspective, and not lose the essence of what we're doing - the music.

Carl Barks

I read some of my stories recently and thought, 'How in the hell did I get away with that?' I had some really raw cynicism in some of them.

C. S. Lewis

But he always licked to get visitors alone in the billiard room and tell them stories about a mysterious lady, a foreign royalty, with whom he had driven about London. 'A devilish temper she had,' he would say. 'But she was a dem fine woman, sir, a dem fine woman.

Charles Dickens

Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distintly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.

Sandra Cisneros

One of my favorite writers is Hans Christian Anderson. His stories speak to the times.

Brent Spiner

Hollywood has more than its share of harsh and crewel stories. In fact, it's probably more the norm than the exception.

Bret Easton Ellis

Exploitation is a harsh word, I know that, but on a certain level, to me that is the central Hollywood story.

Diane Setterfield

Everybody has a story. It's like families. You might not know who they are, might have lost them, but they exist all the same. You might drift apart or you might turn your back on them, but you can't say you haven't got them. Same goes for stories.

Diane Setterfield

A birth is not really a beginning. Our lives at the start are not really our own but only the continuation of someone else's story.

Diane Setterfield

A story so cherished it has to be dressed in casualness to disguise its significance in case the listener turned out to be unsympathetic.