A strange year. A year of realization and struggle but also never had I more personally noticed and was conscious of God's grace in everyday life.
The mistakes made brought forth clarity and focus on sin in my life. God making known his intentions to mature and not always pursuing that but that is where He shown the brightest and for that I am grateful.
"Be sure of your call to every business you go about. Though it is the least business, be sure of your call to it; then, whatever you meet with, you may quiet your heart with this: I know I am where God would have me. Nothing in the world will quiet the heart so much as this: when I meet with any cross, I know I am where God would have me, in my place and calling; I am about the work that God has set me"
- Jeremiah Burroughs, The Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment (1648)
"Twenty-five years from now all religion will be fundamentalist religion, even the Church of England. Wild-eyed “Tutuist” Anglicans will riot in Anzania (formerly the Union of South Africa). They’ll force people to play contract bridge at gunpoint and make unbelievers eat little sandwiches with the crusts cut off. No woman will dare appear in the street without a small, stupid hat like Queen Di’s"
- P.J. O'Rourke, Holidays in Hell (1988)
" 'Call on Me in the day of trouble. I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.' The whole life of a Christian is a praying, waiting life"
- Thomas Boston, The Crook in the Lot (1737)
"Sooner or later...one has to take sides. If one is to remain human"
- Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955)
"Lord Jesus, make Thyself to me A living, bright reality; More present to faith’s vision keen Than any outward object seen; More dear, more intimately nigh Than e’en the sweetest earthly tie"
- Howard Taylor, Hudson Taylor's Spiritual Secret (1932)
"Dear Mother,
I meant to write you before this and I hope you haven't been worried.... I have met some Beautiful People and..."
- Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968)
"Reality poisons the spring of fantasy, whereas fantasy, when it erupts into the real world, brings destruction in its wake"
- Brian Masters, The Shrine of Jeffrey Dahmer (1993)
"I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire...I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools"
- William Faulkner, The Sound and The Fury (1929)
"The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that things are not mended again"
- Alan Paton, Cry, The Beloved Country (1948)
"Feeling God’s hatred is incomparably more terrible than dying. Thus ends the power of those who defy God, Our Lord"
- Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira, The agony and death of Stalin (1975)
"there is a loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of the hands of a clock"
- Charles Bukowski, Love Is a Dog from Hell (1977)
"Sin is cosmic treason. Sin is treason against a perfectly pure Sovereign. It is an act of supreme ingratitude toward the One to whom we owe everything, to the One who has given us life itself. Have you ever considered the deeper implications of the slightest sin, of the most minute peccadillo? What are we saying to our Creator when we disobey Him at the slightest point? We are saying no to the righteousness of God. We are saying, “God, Your law is not good. My judgement is better than Yours. Your authority does not apply to me. I am above and beyond Your jurisdiction. I have the right to do what I want to do, not what You command me to do"
- R.C. Sproul, The Holiness of God (1984)
"Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all"
- Andrew Murray, Humility (1895)
"When the Scripture relates redemption to the law of God, the terms it uses are to be carefully marked. It does not say we are redeemed from the law. That would not be an accurate description and the Scripture refrains from such an expression. We are not redeemed from the obligation to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and strength and mind and our neighbour as ourselves.
The law is comprehended in these two commandments (Matt. 22:40) and love is the fulfilling of the law (Rom. 13:10)... It would contradict the very nature of God to think that any person can ever be relieved of the necessity to love God with the whole heart and to obey his commandments.
When Scripture relates redemption to the law of God it uses terms that are more specific"
- John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied (1954)
"Chamberlain closed his eyes and saw it again. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. No book or music would have that beauty. He did not understand it: a mile of men flowing slowly, steadily, inevitably up the long green ground, dying all the while, coming to kill you, and the shell bursts appearing above them like instant white flowers, and the flags all tipping and fluttering, and dimly you could hear the music and the drums, and then you could hear the officers screaming, and yet even above your own fear came the sensation of unspeakable beauty. He shook his head, opened his eyes. Professor's mind. But he thought of Aristotle: pity and terror. So this is tragedy. Yes. He nodded. In the presence of real tragedy you feel neither pain nor joy nor hatred, only a sense of enormous space and time suspended, the great doors open to black eternity, the rising across the terrible field of that last enormous, unanswerable question"
- Michael Shaara, The Killer Angels (1974)
"Even on the cross He did not hide Himself from sight; rather, He made all creation witness to the presence of its Maker"
"Facing the 'irreparable outrage of time' a man with Faith says: 'I am marching toward my resurrection.' " - Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira The agony and death of Stalin (1975)
"The crowd is not us. It never is"
- Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (1990)
"Janet Malcolm had famously described journalism as the art of seduction and betrayal. Any reporter who didn't see journalism as "morally indefensible" was either "too stupid" or "too full of himself," she wrote. I disagreed. Without shutting the door on the possibility that I was both stupid and full of myself, I'd never bought into the seduction and betrayal conceit. At most, journalism - particularly when writing about media-hungry public figures - was like the seduction of a prostitute. The relationship was transactional. They weren't talking to me because they liked me or because I impressed them; they were talking to me because they wanted the cover of Rolling Stone"
- Michael Hastings, The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2011)
"When spring came, even the false spring, there were no problems except where to be happiest. The only thing that could spoil a day was people and if you could keep from making engagements, each day had no limits. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself"
- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (1964)
"I myself have read the writings and teachings of the heretics, polluting my soul for a while with their abominable notions, though deriving this benefit: I was able to refute them for myself and loathe them even more"
- Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History (324 AD)
"Gratitude quenches the fire of lust. A thankful spirit destroys the driving passion for sex because it creates contentment within the man’s heart. It soothes the beast, smothers the flames, and medicates the itch. The message behind lust is, “I want! I want! I want!” The feeling lodged within the grateful heart is, “Look at all I have! Thank You Lord, for all that You have done for me and given me. I don’t need anything else.” A grateful heart is a full heart"
- Steve Gallagher, At The Altar of Sexual Idolatry (2000)
"Herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, — all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, — who is good? not that men are ignorant, — what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men"
- W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
"But at times I wondered if I had not come a long way only to find that what I really sought was something I had left behind"
- Jon Krakauer, Into Thin Air (1997)
"Actually that’s my secret — I can’t even talk about you to anybody because I don’t want any more people to know how wonderful you are"
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night (1934)
"It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life"
- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage (1915)
"it is much easier to be the opposition to a government than to run the government yourself"
- Ernest Hemingway, By-Line꞉ Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades (1967)
"God's thoughts of you are many, let not yours be few in return"
- Charles H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David (1869)
"I am young, I am twenty years old; yet I know nothing of life but despair, death, fear, and fatuous superficiality cast over an abyss of sorrow. I see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another"
- Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)
"The end of the war was like the beginning, with the army marching down the open road under the spring sky, seeing a far light on the horizon. Many lights had died in the windy dark but far down the road there was always a gleam, and it was as if a legend had been created to express some obscure truth that could not otherwise be stated. Everything had changed, the war and the men and the land they fought for, but the road ahead had not changed. It went on through the trees and past the little towns and over the hills, and there was no getting to the end of it. The goal was a going-towards rather than an arriving, and from the top of the next rise there was always a new vista. The march toward it led through wonder and terror and deep shadows, and the sunlight touched the flags at the head of the column"
- Bruce Catton, A Stillness at Appomattox (1953)
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