Being Quotes (page 450)
And let me in this place movingly admonish you, ye ship-owners of Nantucket! Beware of enlisting in your vigilant fisheries any lad with lean brow and hollow eye; given to unseasonable meditativeness; and who offers to ship with the Phdon instead of Bowditch in his head. Beware of such an one, I say: your whales must be seen before they can be killed...
Herman Melville
I came to the conclusion, Marilla, that I wasnt born for city life and that I was glad of it. It's nice to be eating ice-cream at brilliant restaurants at eleven o'clock at night once in a while; but as a regular thing I'd rather be in east gable at eleven, sound asleep, but kind of knowing even in my sleep that the stars were shining outside and the wind was blowing the firs across the brook.
L. M. Montgomery
Teach us, O God, that nothing is necessary to Thee. Were anything necessary to Thee that thing would be the measure of Thine imperfection: and how could we worship one who is imperfect? If nothing is necessary to Thee, then no one is necessary, and if no one, then not we. Thou dost seek us though Thou does not need us. We seek Thee because we need Thee, for in Thee we live and move and have our being. Amen.
Aiden Wilson Tozer
Christians were never meant to be normal. We’ve always been holy troublemakers, we’ve always been creators of uncertainty, agents of dimension that’s incompatible with the status quo; we do not accept the world as it is, but we insist on the world becoming the way that God wants it to be. And the Kingdom of God is different from the patterns of this world.
Jacques Ellul
To be godless is probably the first step to innocence," he said, "to lose the sense of sin and subordination, the false grief for things supposed to be lost."So by innocence you mean not an absence of experience, but an absence of illusions."An absence of need for illusions," he said. "A love of and respect for what is right before your eyes.
Anne Rice
That the hand of God was involved in the birth of the new nation he had no doubt. "It is the will of heaven that the two countries should be sundered forever." If the people now were to have "unbounded power," and as the people were quite capable of corruption as "the great," and thus high risks were involved, he would submit all his hopes and fears to an overruling providence, "in which unfashionable as the faith may be, I firmly believe.
David McCullough
The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things? war and hunger and date rape? liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.
P. J. O'Rourke