On Good Quotes

I love a good quote. At times when I happen upon one it is just the thing I need to make sense of what I am feeling or experiencing. The words of a good quote can comfort, affirm, and empower. At other times stumbling upon a good quote is like discovering a new friend. I think, “What? You too? I thought I was the only one.” (C.S. Lewis).

Below are some of my favorite quotes (though it is by no means an exhaustive list). I’d love to know some of your favorites. Please, take the time to include them in the comments below.

• “There’s too much tendency to attribute to God the evils that man does of his own free will.” ―Agatha Christie
• “Fairy tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”  ―G.K. Chesterton
• “There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.”
  ― G.K. Chesterton
• “Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
  ― G.K Chesterton
• “Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.” ―C.S. Lewis
• “God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.” ―C.S. Lewis
• “We are always falling in love or quarreling, looking for jobs or fearing to lose them, getting ill and recovering, following public affairs. If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” ―C.S. Lewis
• “There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self—God’s idea of us when he devised us—the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which, most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for. “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.”
  ― George MacDonald
• “A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”
  ― George MacDonald
• “The beginning of love is to let those we love be perfectly themselves, and not to twist them to fit our own image. Otherwise we love only the reflection of ourselves we find in them.”―Thomas Merton
• “The biggest human temptation is to settle for too little.”  ―Thomas Merton
• “The tighter you squeeze, the less you have.” ―Thomas Merton
• “We are so obsessed with doing that we have no time and no imagination left for being. As a result, men are valued not for what they are but for what they do or what they have – for their usefulness.”  ―Thomas Merton
• “The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer, because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you, in proportion to your fear of being hurt. The one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”―Thomas Merton
• “When suddenly you seem to lose all you thought you had gained, do not despair. You must expect setbacks and regressions. Don’t say to yourself “All is lost. I have to start all over again.” This is not true. What you have gained you have gained….When you return to the the road, you return to the place where you left it, not to where you started.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen
• “Jesus.. says, ‘Let go of your complaints, forgive those who loved you poorly, step over your feelings of being rejected, and have the courage to trust that you won’t fall into an abyss of nothingness but into the safe embrace of a God whose love will heal all your wounds.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen
• “One of the tragedies of our life is that we keep forgetting who we are” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen
• “There are two extremes to avoid: being completely absorbed in your pain and being distracted by so many things that you stay far away from the wound you want to heal.” ― Henri J.M. Nouwen
• “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” ― Flannery O’Connor
• “All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.” ― Flannery O’Connor
• “I can, with one eye squinted, take it all as a blessing.” ― Flannery O’Connor
• “I divide people into two classes:the Irksome and the Non-Irksome without regard to sex.” –Flannery O’Connor
• “In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.”   Dorothy L. Sayers
• “I am occasionally desired by congenital imbeciles and the editors of magazines to say something about the writing of detective fiction “from the woman’s point of view.” To such demands, one can only say “Go away and don’t be silly. You might as well ask what is the female angle on an equilateral triangle.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers
• “Even idiots occasionally speak the truth accidentally.”― Dorothy L. Sayers
• “Do you find it easy to get drunk on words?””So easy that, to tell you the truth, I am seldom perfectly sober.”
  ― Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night
• “Jealousy is the tribute mediocrity pays to genius.” ―Fulton J Sheen
• “The trouble with you, dear, is that you think an angel of the Lord as a creature with wings, whereas he is probably a scruffy little man with a bowler hat.”
  ― Josephine Tey
• “Nothing puts things into perspective as quickly as a mountain.” ―Josephine Tey

Author: Rebekah Durham

Rebekah Durham lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her three children.  She is a graduate of Columbia Theological Seminary and has written for numerous publications. She is an avid reader and in particular an admirer of C.S. Lewis, Thomas Merton, G.K. Chesterton, Henri Nouwen, and Dorothy L. Sayers (in no certain order). She'd also blindly follow Miss Marple (Agatha Christie's famous spinster sleuth) anywhere she wanted to go. View all posts by Rebekah Durham