Quotes

Question 1

Abraham Kuyper on God’s sovereingty

Answer 1

‘There is not one inch in the entire area of our human life about which Christ, who is sovereign of all, does not cry out, “mine.”’

Question 2

Abraham Lincoln on government

Answer 2

‘Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and to form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred – right, which, we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.’

Question 3

Abraham Lincoln on character

Answer 3

‘Character is like a tree, and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.’

Question 4

Abraham Lincoln on human beauty

Answer 4

‘Common looking people are the best in the world: that is the reason the Lord makes so many of them.’

Question 5

Adam Smith on conscience

Answer 5

‘What can be added to the happiness of a man who is in health, out of debt, and has a clean conscience?’

Question 6

Adam Smith on self-interest

Answer 6

‘It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer and the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.’

Question 7

Antoine de Saint-Exupery on human motivation

Answer 7

‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.’

Question 8

Augustine on the meaning of life

Answer 8

‘Thou has made us for thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.’

Question 9

Benjamin Franklin on ingenuity

Answer 9

‘Necessity is the mother of invention.’

Question 10

Benjamin Franklin on virtue

Answer 10

‘Virtue is its own reward.’

Question 11

Benjamin Franklin on procrastination

Answer 11

‘Procrastination is the thief of time.’

Question 12

Bernard Mandeville on self-interest

Answer 12

‘Private vices are public benefits.’

Question 13

Bram Stoker on vocation

Answer 13

‘If only I could have as strong a cause as my poor mad friend there, a good, unselfish cause to make me work, that would be indeed happiness.’

Question 14

Charles Spurgeon on the pastoral vocation

Answer 14

‘It is our duty and our privilege to exhaust our lives for Jesus. We are not to be living specimens of men in fine preservation, but living sacrifices, whose lot is to be consumed. We are to spend and to be spent, not to lay ourselves up in lavender and nurse our flesh.’

Question 15

C. S. Lewis on intellect and emotion

Answer 15

‘Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that “a gentleman does not cheat,” than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up amongst sharpers.’

Question 16

David Hume on testimony/miracles

Answer 16

‘No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.’

Question 17

David Hume on belief

Answer 17

‘The Christian religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one.’

Question 18

David Hume on history

Answer 18

‘A main acquainted with history may, in some respect, be said to have lived from the beginning of the world, and to have been making continual additions to his stock of knowledge in every century.’

Question 19

David Hume on the passions

Answer 19

‘Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.’

Question 20

David Hume on the meaning of life

Answer 20

‘The life of a man is of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.’

Question 21

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on confession

Answer 21

‘And is not the reason perhaps for the our countless relapses and the feebleness of our Christian obedience, to be found precisely in the fact that we are living on self-forgiveness and not on real forgiveness?’

Question 22

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the cost of discipleship

Answer 22

‘When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.’

Question 23

Albert Einstein on atomic power

Answer 23

‘The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking. The answer to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.’

Question 24

F. Scott Fitzgerald on intelligence

Answer 24

‘The true test of a first-rate mind is the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time.’

Question 25

Francis Bacon on self-knowledge

Answer 25

'It is a sad fate for a man to die too well known to everybody else, and still unknown to himself.'

Question 26

George Eliot on small acts

Answer 26

'But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.'

Question 27

G. K. Chesterton on open-mindedness

Answer 27

'The purpose of an open mind is like the purpose of an open mouth: that you should shut it again on something solid.'

Question 28

G. K. Chesterton on religion/ego

Answer 28

'It has often been said, very truly, that religion is the thing that makes the ordinary man feel extraordinary; it is an equally important truth that religion is the thing that makes the extraordinary man feel ordinary.'

Question 29

G. K. Chesterton on rationalization

Answer 29

'An enormous amount of modern ingenuity is expended on finding defences for the indefensible conduct of the powerful.'

Question 30

G. K. Chesterton on belief

Answer 30

'A thing may be too sad to be believed or too wicked to be believed or too good to be believed; but it cannot be too asburd to be believed in this planet of frogs and elephants, of crocodiles and cuttle-fish.'

Question 31

G. K. Chesterton on tradition

Answer 31

'Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.'

Question 32

G. K. Chesterton on activists

Answer 32

'The reformer is always right about what is wrong. He is generally wrong about what is right.'

Question 33

G. K. Chesterton on reason

Answer 33

'Reason is always a kind of brute force; those who appeal to the head rather than the heart, however pallid and polite, are necessarily men of violence. We speak of "touching" a man's heart, but we can do nothing to his head but hit is.'

Question 34

G. K. Chesterton on Christianity

Answer 34

'Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and not tried.'

Question 35

G. K. Chesterton on fallacies

Answer 35

'Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.'

Question 36

G. K. Chesterton on inconvenience

Answer 36

'An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.'

Question 37

G. K. Chesterton on sanity

Answer 37

'He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.'

Question 38

G. K. Chesterton on strength

Answer 38

'Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.'

Question 39

G. K. Chesterton on complaining

Answer 39

'Complaint always comes back in an echo from the ends of the world; but silence strengthens us.'

Question 40

G. K. Chesterton on progress

Answer 40

'I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form this takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid old custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.'

Question 41

G. K. Chesterton on philosophy

Answer 41

'A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any can possible be alive.'

Question 42

G. K. Chesterton on human equality

Answer 42

'The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in dogma about the divine origin of man.'

Question 43

G. K. Chesterton on fighting

Answer 43

'The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.'

Question 44

G. K. Chesterton on rights

Answer 44

'To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.'

Question 45

G. K. Chesterton on political solutions

Answer 45

'When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.'

Question 46

G. K. Chesterton on politicians

Answer 46

'It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.'

Question 47

G. K. Chesterton on nations

Answer 47

'There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.'

Question 48

G. K. Chesterton on government

Answer 48

'All government is an ugly necessity.'

Question 49

Horace on being prepared

Answer 49

'To be forewarned is to be forearmed.'

Question 50

Ignatius of Antioch on martyrdom

Answer 50

'For neither shall I ever have such an opportunity of attaining to God, nor can you, if you be but silent, have any better deed ascribed to you. For if you are silent concerning me, I am a word of God; but if you love my flesh, I shall again be only a cry. Grant me nothing more than that I be poured out to God, while an altar is still ready, that forming yourselves into a chorus of love, you may sing to the Father in Christ Jesus, that God has vouchsafed that the bishop of Syria shall be found at the setting of the sun, having fetched him from the sun's rising. It is good to set the world towards God, that I may rise to him.'

Question 51

Immanuel Kant on human nature

Answer 51

'Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.'

Question 52

Ludwig Wittgenstein on scientism

Answer 52

'The deception of modernism is the idea that the laws of nature explain the world to us, when all they do is to describe structural regularities.'

Question 53

John Stuart Mill on narrow-mindedness

Answer 53

'He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.'

Question 54

Kafka on suffering

Answer 54

'You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.'

Question 55

Martin Luther on hypocrites

Answer 55

'The curse of the godless man can sound more pleasant in God's ears than the Hallelujah of the pious.'

Question 56

Michelangelo

Answer 56

'The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.'

Question 57

Old hymn on human frailty

Answer 57

'We are frail children of dust, and as feeble as we are frail.'

Question 58

Ralph Waldo Emerson on consistency

Answer 58

'a foolish consistency, [which is] the hobgoblin of little minds.'

Question 59

Oscar Wilde on originality

Answer 59

'Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.'

Question 60

Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna, on martyrdom

Answer 60

'For eighty and six years have I been his servant, and he has done me no wrong, and how can I blaspheme my King who saved me?'

Question 61

Salve Regina (prayer)

Answer 61

'To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.'

Question 62

Samuel Johnson on focus

Answer 62

'He who attempts to do all, will waste his life doing little.'

Question 63

Samuel Johnson on envy

Answer 63

'Let it, therefore, be constantly remembered, that whoever envies another, confesses his superiority, and let those be reformed by their pride who have lost their virtue.'

Question 64

Samuel Johnson on government

Answer 64

'Any government is better than no government.'

Question 65

Samuel Johnson's definition of a patron

Answer 65

'Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery.'

Question 66

Samuel Johnson on heroism

Answer 66

'... he who aspires to be a hero must drink brandy.'

Question 67

Samuel Johnson on discussing the weather

Answer 67

'You are telling us that of which none but men in a mine or a dungeon can be ignorant.'

Question 68

Samuel Johnson on achievement

Answer 68

'Few things are impossible to diligence and skill.'

Question 69

Shakespeare on cowardice

Answer 69

'Cowards die many times before their deaths, the valiant never taste of death but once.'

Question 70

Shakespeare's Macbeth on the meaning of life

Answer 70

'Life . . . is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.'

Question 71

Shakespeare on greatness

Answer 71

'Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.'

Question 72

Shakespeare on revenge

Answer 72

'If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?'

Question 73

Tertullian on faith and scholarship

Answer 73

'What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What does the Academy have to do with the Church?'

Question 74

Tertullian on martyrdom

Answer 74

'The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.'

Question 75

Thomas Jefferson on slavery

Answer 75

'God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Establish the law for educating the common people. That it is the business of the state to effect and on a general plan.'

Question 76

Thomas Jefferson on the nature of God

Answer 76

'While reason, mainly in the form of arguments to design, assures us that there is a God, there is no room either for any supernatural revelation of that God or for any transactions between that God and individual human beings.'

Question 77

Thomas Paine on organized religion

Answer 77

'All institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.'

Question 78

Thomas Paine on arms

Answer 78

'Arms discourage and keep the invader and plunderer in awe, and preserve order in the world as well as property ... Horrid mischief would ensue were the law-abiding deprived of the use of them.'

Question 79

Woody Allen on immortality

Answer 79

'I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen. I would rather live on in my apartment.'