The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.
We'd get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.
Sexual intercourse is rapidly becoming the one thing venerated in a world without veneration.
"The time has come", the Walrus said, "To talk of many things: Of shoes — and ships — and sealing wax — Of cabbages — and Kings — And why the Sea is boiling hot — And whether pigs have wings."
I suppose everyone knows this fear of getting “drawn in” the moment at which a man realizes that what had seemed mere speculations are on the point of landing him in the Communist Party or the Christian Church—the sense that a door has just slammed and left him on the inside.
Many a genius has been of slow growth. Oaks, that flourish for a thousand years, do not spring up into beauty like a reed.
I have learned now that while those who speak about one's miseries usually hurt, those who keep silence hurt more.
Marry, Sirs, if Merlin who was the Devil's son was a true King's man as ever ate bread, is it not a shame that you, being but the sons of bitches, must be rebels and regicides?
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word 'darkness' on the walls of his cell.
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn't be. And what it wouldn't be, it would. You see?
You used to be much more..."muchier." You've lost your muchness.
The dissolution of society bids fair to become the termination of a career of which property is the end and aim, because such a career contains the elements of self-destruction. Democracy in government, brotherhood in society, equality in rights and privileges, and universal education, foreshadow the next higher plane of society to which experience, intelligence and knowledge are steadily tending. [ Ancient Society .]
Genius never grows old; young to-day, mature yesterday, vigorous to-morrow: always immortal. It is peculiar to no sex or condition, and is the divine gift to woman no less than to man.--_Juan Lewis._
Well, if I eat it, and if it makes me grow larger, I can reach the key; and if makes me grow smaller, I can creep under the door: so either way I'll get into the garden, and I don't care which happens!
Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.
Eating and reading are two pleasures that combine admirably.
Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD: Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only - and that is to support the ultimate career.
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
We may give our human loves the unconditional allegiance which we owe only to God. Then they become gods: then they become demons. Then they will destroy us, and also destroy themselves. For natural loves that are allowed to become gods do not remain loves. They are still called so, but can become in fact complicated forms of hatred.
"In that direction," the Cat said, waving its right paw round, "lives a Hatter: and in that direction," waving the other paw, "lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad." "But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked. "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad." "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice. "You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."
It is a good rule after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.
Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst.” -C.S. Lewis</b>
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.
The cycle of the machine is now coming to an end. Man has learned much in the hard discipline and the shrewd, unflinching grasp of practical possibilities that the machine has provided in the last three centuries: but we can no more continue to live in the world of the machine than we could live successfully on the barren surface of the moon.
I wonder if the snow loves the trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
Mother Nature is a peculiar entity. On the one hand, she gives us everything that we need to live. On the other hand, she keeps trying to kill us.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity" and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man.
If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.
A critical knowledge of the evolution of the idea of property would embody, in some respects, the most remarkable portion of the mental history of mankind. [ Ancient Society . Palo Alto, California: New York Labor News, 1978, p. 6. (Reprint of 1877 edition).]
He died not for men, but for each man. If each man had been the only man made, He would have done no less.
I've had enough of breakdowns and diagrams — judging from picture books, apparently Heaven is a partly cloudy place.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
The faster I go, the behinder I get.
Centralize property in the hands of a few and the millions are under bondage to property — a bondage as absolute and deplorable as if their limbs were covered with manacles. Abstract all property from the hands of labor and you thereby reduce labor to dependence; and that dependence becomes as complete a servitude as the master could fix upon his slave. [Lecture, Diffusion Against Centralization ,1852.]
If you drink much from a bottle marked "poison" it is almost certain to disagree with you, sooner or later.
You can never get a cup of tea large enough or a book long enough to suit me.
It is hard to have patience with people who say "There is no death" or "Death doesn't matter." There is death. And whatever is matters. And whatever happens has consequences, and it and they are irrevocable and irreversible. You might as well say that birth doesn't matter.
Nothing is unthinkable, nothing impossible to the balanced person, provided it comes out of the needs of life and is dedicated to life's further development.
She generally gave herself very good advice, (though she very seldom followed it).
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.
The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art...It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.
I can't go back to yesterday because I was a different person then.
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on; you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make any sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of - throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were being made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
Who in the world am I? Ah, that's the great puzzle.
Begin at the beginning," the King said, very gravely, "and go on till you come to the end: then stop.
If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.
Man’s Chief purpose…is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life. [ Faith for Living , 1940.]
What draws people to be friends is that they see the same truth. They share it.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. ― C.S. Lewis</b>
Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.
Curiouser and curiouser!
The time will come when human intelligence will rise to the mastery of property. [ Ancient Society .]
Statistically the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.
All that is not eternal is eternally out of date.
Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
Be sure the safest rule is that we should not dare to live in any scene in which we dare not die. But, once realise what the true object is in life that it is not pleasure, not knowledge, not even fame itself, 'that last infirmity of noble minds' but that it is the development of character, the rising to a higher, nobler, purer standard, the building-up of the perfect Man and then, so long as we feel that this is going on, and will (we trust) go on for evermore, death has for us no terror; it is not a shadow, but a light; not an end, but a beginning!
More succinctly, C. S. Lewis wrote: They say of some temporal suffering, “No future bliss can make up for it,” not knowing that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony into a glory.16
Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning...
One of the deep secrets of life is that all that is really worth the doing is what we do for others.
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
Writing a check separates a commitment from a conversation. —Warren Buffett
The growth of property and the desire for its transmission to children was, in reality, the moving power which brought in monogamy to insure legitimate heirs, and to limit their number to the actual progeny of the married pair. [ Ancient Society, or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery, Through Barbarism to Civilization , Palo Alto, California: New York Labor News, 1978 (Reprint of 1877 edition), p. 477.]
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master that's all."
I can't imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.
I'm on Aslan's side even if there isn't any Aslan to lead it. I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia.
Some people talk as if meeting the gaze of absolute goodness would be fun. They need to think again. They are still only playing with religion. Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger — according to the way you react to it.
God can't give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.
The segregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities for leisure, and to another all the burdens of work, dooms both classes to spiritual sterility. [ Faith for Living , 1940.]
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained.
Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.
Quotes by people born this day, already used as QOTD: So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately, that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
As long as man loves a phantom in the sky more than he loves his fellow man, there will never be peace upon this earth; so long as man worships a Tyrant as the "Fatherhood of God," there will never be a "Brotherhood of Man.
You can make anything by writing.
The church knows that an educated man is an unbeliever.
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.
My fear was now of another kind. I felt sure that the creature was what we call “good,” but I wasn’t sure whether I liked “goodness” so much as I had supposed. This is a very terrible experience. As long as what you are afraid of is something evil, you may still hope that the good may come to your rescue. But suppose you struggle through to the good and find that is also dreadful?
Life is too deep for words, so don't try to describe it, just live it.
No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally – and often far more – worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alice soon began talking again. 'Dinah'll miss me very much to-night, I should think!' (Dinah was the cat.) 'I hope they'll remember her saucer
"Dogma is the sacrifice of wisdom to consistency."
We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.
Twas brillig and the slithy toves, Did gyre and gimble in the wabe; All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. "Beware the Jabberwock, my son, the jaws that bite and claws that scratch Beware the jubjub bird and shun the frumious bandersnatch."
I suppose every child has a world of his own and every man, too, for the matter of that. I wonder if that's the cause for all the misunderstanding there is in Life?
All we know is the phenomenon: we spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function; it is what we do with our lives." -- Lewis Thomas, "The Lives of a Cell"
Term, holidays, term, holidays, till we leave school, and then work, work, work till we die. -- C. S. Lewis</p>
What I tell you three times is true. -- Lewis Carroll
If Love Were Oil, I'd Be About A Quart Low -- Book title by Lewis Grizzard
"I quite agree with you," said the Duchess; "and the moral of that is -- `Be what you would seem to be' -- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- `Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.'" -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone,
ever.
Nobody suffers the pain of birth or the anguish of loving a child in order for presidents to make wars, for governments to feed on the substance of their people, for insurance companies to cheat the young and rob the old. -- Lewis Lapham
I'm So Miserable Without You It's Almost Like Having You Here -- Song title by Stephen Bishop. She Got the Gold Mine, I Got the Shaft -- Song title by Jerry Reed. When My Love Comes Back from the Ladies' Room Will I Be Too Old to Care? -- Song title by Lewis Grizzard. I Don't Know Whether to Kill Myself or Go Bowling -- Unattributed song title. Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goal Posts of Life -- Unattributed song title.
"...The name of the song is called 'Haddocks' Eyes'!" "Oh, that's the name of the song, is it?" Alice said, trying to feel interested. "No, you don't understand," the Knight said, looking a little vexed. "That's what the name is called. The name really is, 'The Aged Aged Man.'" "Then I ought to have said "That's what the song is called'?" Alice corrected herself. "No, you oughtn't: that's quite another thing! The song is called 'Ways and Means': but that's only what it is called you know!" "Well, what is the song then?" said Alice, who was by this time completely bewildered. "I was coming to that," the Knight said. "The song really is "A-sitting on a Gate": and the tune's my own invention." -- Lewis Carroll, "Through the Looking Glass"
A woman shouldn't have to buy her own perfume. -- Maurine Lewis</p>
"I don't know what you mean by 'glory'," Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. "Of course you don't -- till I tell you. I meant 'there's a nice knock-down argument for you!'" "But glory doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected. "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master -- that's all." -- Lewis Carrol, "Through the Looking Glass"
Once, there was NO fun ... This was before MENU planning, FASHION statements or NAUTILUS equipment ... Then, in 1985 ... FUN was completely encoded in this tiny MICROCHIP ... It contain 14,768 vaguely amusing SIT-COM pilots!! We had to wait FOUR BILLION years but we finally got JERRY LEWIS, MTV and a large selection of creme-filled snack cakes!
N: Phil Lewis</p> E: beans@bucket.ualr.edu D: Promised to send money if I would put his name in the source tree. S: PO Box 371 S: North Little Rock, Arkansas 72115 S: US -- /usr/src/linux/CREDITS
Most Texans think Hanukkah is some sort of duck call. -- Richard Lewis</p>
"There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." -- C. S. Lewis, "The Chronicles of Narnia"
Well, the handwriting is on the floor. -- Joe E. Lewis</p>
"Yes, let's consider," said Bruno, putting his thumb into his mouth again, and sitting down upon a dead mouse. "What do you keep that mouse for?" I said. "You should either bury it or else throw it into the brook." "Why, it's to measure with!" cried Bruno. "How ever would you do a garden without one? We make each bed three mouses and a half long, and two mouses wide." I stopped him as he was dragging it off by the tail to show me how it was used... -- Lewis Carroll, "Sylvie and Bruno"
Speak roughly to your little boy, And beat him when he sneezes: He only does it to annoy Because he knows it teases. Wow! wow! wow! I speak severely to my boy, And beat him when he sneezes: For he can thoroughly enjoy The pepper when he pleases! Wow! wow! wow! -- Lewis Carrol, "Alice in Wonderland"
Carol's head ached as she trailed behind the unsmiling Calibrees along the block of booths. She chirruped at Kennicott, "Let's be wild! Let's ride on the merry-go-round and grab a gold ring!" Kennicott considered it, and mumbled to Calibree, "Think you folks would like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Calibree considered it, and mumbled to his wife, "Think you'd like to stop and try a ride on the merry-go-round?" Mrs. Calibree smiled in a washed-out manner, and sighed, "Oh no, I don't believe I care to much, but you folks go ahead and try it." Calibree stated to Kennicott, "No, I don't believe we care to a whole lot, but you folks go ahead and try it." Kennicott summarized the whole case against wildness: "Let's try it some other time, Carrie." She gave it up. -- Sinclair Lewis, "Main Street"