Quotations

For God so loved the world, that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.


Here are some of my favorite famous quotations (whether good or bad):

"In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity."
-- Augustine

"If you look at the world, you’ll be distressed. If you look within, you’ll be depressed. But if you look at Christ, you’ll be at rest."
-- Corrie Ten Boom

"The greatest proof of Christianity for others is not how far a man can logically analyze his reasons for believing, but how far in practice he will stake his life on his belief."
-- T. S. Eliot

"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."
-- Jim Elliot

"Faith is taking a step in the same direction that the evidence is pointing."
-- Lee Strobel

"Only one life, it will soon be past; Only what's done for Christ will last."
-- C.T. Studd

"If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing."
-- Blaise Pascal

"God in His love always wills what is best for us. In His wisdom He always knows what is best, and in His sovereignty He has the power to bring it about."
-- Jerry Bridges

"Be kinder than necessary because everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle."
-- James M. Barrie

"The whole secret of life is to be interested in one thing profoundly and in a thousand things well."
-- Horace Walpole

"All truth is God's truth."
-- John Calvin




"It is no fault of Christianity that a hypocrite falls into sin."
-- Jerome

"God judged it better to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist."
-- Augustine of Hippo

"Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important."
"There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight."
"Perfect humility dispenses with modesty."
"Badness is only spoiled goodness."
-- C. S. Lewis

"An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge."
-- John Wesley

"Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can."
-- John Wesley

I value all things only by the price they shall gain in eternity.
-- John Wesley

"Do I not most effectually destroy my enemies, in making them my friends?"
-- Sigismund

"I never thought much of the courage of a lion tamer. Inside the cage he is at least safe from people."
-- George Bernard Shaw

"God does not play dice with the cosmos."
-- Albert Einstein

"Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world."
-- Albert Einstein

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
-- Albert Einstein

"Science investigates religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power religion gives man wisdom which is control."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried."
-- G. K. Chesterton

"The whole duty of humanity, from a Christian perspective is: 'To know God and to show God.'"
-- James Patterson

"Prayer is good; but when used as a substitute for obedience, it is nothing but a blatant hypocrisy... Don't hedge! Time flies! ... Enlist!"
-- C. T. Studd

"Whatever we make the most of is our God."
-- Luther

"In science we have been reading only the notes to a poem; in Christianity we find the poem itself."
-- C. S. Lewis

"God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world."
-- C. S. Lewis

"It shall greatly help thee to understand scripture if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom, and to whom, and with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, and with what circumstances, consideing what goeth before, and what followeth."
-- J. Wycliffe

"I would rather win souls than be the greatest king or emperor on earth; I would rather win souls than be the greatest general that ever commanded an army... my one ambition in life is to win as many as possible. oh, it is the only thing worth doing; to save souls; and, men and women, we can all do it."
-- R. A. Torrey

"If any one of about 40 physical qualities had more than slightly different values, life as we know it could not exist..."
-- Stephen Hawking

"Grown-ups never understand anything by themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them."
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be' - she always called me Elwood - 'In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."
-- Elwood P. Dowd

"If we're going to be damned, let's be damned for what we really are."
-- Jean-Luc Picard

"Jesus is coming, look busy."
-- Tattooed on the bottom of the fake Archbishop of Canterbury in the movie Johnny English
-- Also appears on various T-shirts, and also on an episode of The Simpsons

"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"It is impossible to reason without arriving at a Supreme Being. Religion is as necessary to reason as reason is to religion. The one cannot exist without the other."
-- George Washington

(The quote often attributed to Washington, "It is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the Bible.", is apparently spurious.)

"Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me. Amen."
-- Martin Luther, Speech at the Diet of Worms (April 18, 1521)

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever."
"Speak only if it improves upon the silence."
-- Mohandas Karamchand "Mahatma" Gandhi

"It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err."
-- Mohandas Gandhi

"Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair."
-- Gilbert K. Chesterton

"No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: He is always convinced that it says what he means."
-- George Bernard Shaw

"Time Is...
Too slow for those who wait,
Too swift for those who fear,
Too long for those who grieve,
Too short for those who rejoice,
But for those who love,
Time is Eternity."
-- Henry Van Dyke

"I see God in every human being. When I wash the leper's wounds, I feel I am nursing the Lord himself. Is it not a beautiful experience?"
-- Mother Teresa

"Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend."
-- Martin Luther King, Jr.

"I have found that if you love life, life will love you back."
-- Arthur Rubenstein

"Love is like a beautiful flower which I may not touch, but whose fragrance makes the garden a place of delight just the same".
-- Helen Keller

"The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart".
-- Helen Keller

"A happy life consists not in the absence, but in the mastery of hardships."
"When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us."
-- Helen Keller

"Take away love, and our earth is a tomb".
-- Robert Browning

"Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails."
-- 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a

"A wise man will desire no more than what he may get justly, use soberly, distribute cheerfully, and leave contentedly."
-- Benjamin Franklin

"It takes humility to seek feedback. It takes wisdom to understand it, analyze it, and appropriately act on it."
-- Stephen Covey

"Do not begin to teach others until the Lord has taught you."
"Every Christian man has a choice between being humble and being humbled."
"God helps those who cannot help themselves."
"God is more ready to forgive me than I am ready to offend."
"He who does not love sinners cannot pray aright for them."
"Of two evils, choose neither."
"Ten minutes praying is better than a year’s murmuring."
"The Christian should work as if all depended on him, and pray as if it all depended on God."
"Wisdom is the right use of knowledge."
-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"A friend is long sought, hardly found, and with difficulty kept."
-- Jerome

"I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I'm not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
-- Robert McCloskey

"For all the talk you hear about knowledge being such a wonderful thing, instinct is worth forty of it for real unerringness."
-- Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer Abroad

"Humility is to make a right estimate of one's self."
-- Charles Haddon Spurgeon

"Beware the fury of a patient man."
-- John Dryden

"Prayer is simple, as simple as a child making known what it wants to its parents."
-- Oswald Chambers

"The real reason that we can't have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post "Thou shalt not steal", "Thou shalt not commit adultery" and "Thou shalt not lie" in a building full of lawyers, judges and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment."
-- George Carlin

"I think people should be allowed to do anything they want. We haven't tried that for a while. Maybe this time it'll work."
-- George Carlin

"Some people see things that are and ask, Why? Some people dream of things that never were and ask, Why not? Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."
"In comic strips, the person on the left always speaks first."
"'Meow' means 'woof' in cat."
-- George Carlin

"You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded."
"If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done."
-- Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays."
-- Soren Kierkegaard

"Here's to the pilot that weathered the storm."
-- George Canning

"Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There's a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning."
-- Bill Gates

"Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine."
-- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra

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"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability."
"Program testing can be a very effective way to show the presence of bugs, but is hopelessly inadequate for showing their absence."
"If in physics there's something you don't understand, you can always hide behind the uncharted depths of nature. You can always blame God. You didn't make it so complex yourself. But if your program doesn't work, there is no one to hide behind. You cannot hide behind an obstinate nature. If it doesn't work, you've messed up."
"When we had no computers, we had no programming problem either. When we had a few computers, we had a mild programming problem. Confronted with machines a million times as powerful, we are faced with a gigantic programming problem."
"I mean, if 10 years from now, when you are doing something quick and dirty, you suddenly visualize that I am looking over your shoulders and say to yourself: 'Dijkstra would not have liked this', well that would be enough immortality for me."
"... the question of whether Machines Can Think ... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."
-- Edsger W. Dijkstra

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."
-- C. A. R. Hoare (Known as "Hoare's Dictum" about computer programming)
-- (another version by Donald Knuth)

"There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about."
"In mathematics you don't understand things. You just get used to them."
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations."
-- John von Neumann

"Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin."
-- John von Neumann

"People think of the inventor as a screwball, but no one ever asks the inventor what he thinks of other people."
-- Charles Kettering

"An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field."
-- Niels Bohr

"Your theory is crazy, but it's not crazy enough to be true."
-- Niels Bohr

"Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law."
-- Douglass Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid

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"You are the music while the music lasts."
-- T. S. Eliot

"Mozart tells us what it's like to be human, Beethoven tells us what it's like to be Beethoven and Bach tells us what it's like to be the universe."
"[The World Wide Web is] the only thing I know of whose shortened form — www — takes three times longer to say than what it's short for."
"You live and learn. At any rate, you live." (Marvin)
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'"
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so."
"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer." (Zaphod Beeblebrox)
"In the beginning the Universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."
"There is a theory which states that if anybody ever discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened."
-- Douglas Adams





© copyright 2007-2009, O. P. Martin