Saturday, May 24, 2008

C.S. Lewis' early impressions of J.R.R. Tolkien

"A smooth, pale fluent little chap-- no harm in him: only needs a smack or so."

I can't come up with a rejoinder worthy of that. :) So let's just have some more quotes!

Elisabeth Elliot:
"George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life."

Jim Elliot, who was martyred in his 20's:
"God always gives His best to those who leave the choice with Him."
He also wrote this:
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose."

Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin, observing a passing mob in 1848:
"I must follow them for I am their leader."

Henry Ward Beecher:
"Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength."

Rene Descartes:
"Good sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks himself so well supplied with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in every other way do not usually desire more of it than they already have."

John Kenneth Galbraith:
"Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof."

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel:
"What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it. We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

Edmund Burke :
"Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less there is within, the more there must be without."

J.V. Cunningham:
"This is my curse: Pompous, I pray
That you believe the things you say
And that you live them, day by day."

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