My 9th grade geometry teacher used this quote to explain his style of teaching. Truer words are not oft spoken.
“I tell you one thing; if you learn it by yourself, if you have to get down and dig for it, it never leaves you. It stays there as long as you live because you had to dig it out of the mud before you learned what it was.”
~Addie Norton
“The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.”-M. L’Engle (A Circle of Quiet)
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Whatever human freedom means, Divine freedom cannot mean indeterminacy between alternatives and choice of one of them. Perfect goodness can never debate about the end to be attained, and perfect wisdom cannot debate about the means most suited to achieve it. The freedom of God consists in the fact that no cause other than Himself produces His acts and no external obstacle impedes them– that His own goodness is the root from which they all grow and His own omnipotence the air in which they all flower. ((C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1969, 35.))
“Sure,” cried the tenant men, “but it’s our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it. Even if it’s no good, it’s still ours. That’s what makes it ours–being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.”"We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man.”
“Yes, but the bank is only made of men.”
“No, you’re wrong there–quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”
from John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, quoted in Joy at Work by Dennis Bakke.
“No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee’s frothy goodness.” Sheik Abd-Karim
“A morning without coffee is like sleep.”
“Given enough coffee, I could rule the world.”
“Actually, this seems to be the basic need of the human heart in nearly every great crisis– a good hot cup of coffee.” Aleksander King
I am a bow on your hands, Lord.
Draw me, lest I rot.
Do not overdraw me, Lord, I shall break.
Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break?
Nikos Kazantzakis, quoted in The Ragamuffin Gospel, p 178
“For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments. By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”
CS Lewis, The Abolition of Man, 1955 ed, p 24.
“Not was, not may be, nor will be. “The Lord is my shepherd,” is on Sunday, is on Monday, and is through every day of the week; is in January, is in December, and every month of the year; is at home, and is in China; is in peace, and, is in war; in abundance, and in penury.”
–J. Hudson Taylor
Photo by Ansel Adams
“The great thing is, if one can, to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions in one’s ‘own’ or ‘real’ life. The truth is, of course, that what one regards as interruptions are precisely one’s life.”
C.S. Lewis
“For what we need to know, of course, is not just that God exists, not just that beyond the steely brightness of the stars there is a cosmic intelligence of some kind that keeps the whole show going, but that there is a God right here in the thick of our day-by-day lives who may not be writing messages about himself in the stars but in one way or another is trying to get messages through our blindness as we move around down here knee-deep in the fragrant muck and misery and marvel of the world. It is not objective proof of God’s existence that we want but the experience of God’s presence. That is the miracle we are really after, and this is also, I think, the miracle that we really get.”
Frederick Buechner, Quoted by Brennan Manning in The Ragamuffin Gospel, p 93.