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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| fced9f6 | Those who got the twentieth century right, whether in anticipation [..] or as contemporary observations, had to be able to imagine a world for which there was no precedent. | Tony Judt | ||
| 4a28aeb | We must distinguish better than some of our predecessors between desirable ends and unacceptable means. | Tony Judt | ||
| 607631d | Thinking 'economistically', as we have done now for thirty years, is not intrinsic to humans. | Tony Judt | ||
| 7fcf81c | All modern U.S. presidents are perforce politicians, prisoners of their past pronouncements, their party, their constituency, and their colleagues. | presidency president | Tony Judt | |
| dcc7618 | Western intellectual enthusiasm for Communism tended to peak not in times of 'goulash Communism' or 'Socialism with a human face', but rather at the moments of the regime's worst cruelties: 1935-39 and 1944-56. Writers, professors, artists, teachers and journalists frequently admired Stalin not in spite of his faults, but because of them. It was when he was murdering people on an industrial scale, when the show trials were displaying Soviet.. | Tony Judt | ||
| 563cda8 | Literary Fiction and Reality Towards the beginning of his novel The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil announces that 'no serious attempt will be made to... enter into competition with reality.' And yet it is an element in the situation he cannot ignore. How good it would be, he suggests, if one could find in life ' the simplicity inherent in narrative order. 'This is the simple order that consists in being able to say: "When that had happ.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| de24ee1 | We are all poor; but there is a difference between what Mrs. Spark intends by speaking of 'slender means', and what Stevens called our poverty or Sartre our need, besoin. The poet finds his brief, fortuitous concords, it is true: not merely 'what will suffice,' but 'the freshness of transformation,' the 'reality of decreation,' the 'gaiety of language.' The novelist accepts need, the difficulty of relating one's fictions to what one knows a.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 99a79fd | IT is worth remembering that the rise of what we call literary fiction happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated account of the beginning was losing its authority. Now that changes in things as they are change beginnings to make them fit, beginnings have lost their mythical rigidity. There are, it is true, modern attempts to restore this rigidity. But on the whole there is a correlation between subtlety and variety in our fictions.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| ca700f3 | The great majority of interpretations of Apocalypse assume that the End is pretty near. Consequently the historical allegory is always having to be revised; time discredits it. And this is important. Apocalypse can be disconfirmed without being discredited. This is part of its extraordinary resilience. It can also absorb changing interests, rival apocalypses, such as the Sibylline writings. It is patient of change and of historiographical s.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 121b74a | Bohr is really doing what the Stoic allegorists did to close the gap between their world and Homer's, or what St. Augustine did when he explained, against the evidence, the concord of the canonical scriptures. The dissonances as well as the harmonies have to be made concordant by means of some ultimate complementarity. Later biblical scholarship has sought different explanations, and more sophisticated concords; but the motive is the same, .. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 5ab4710 | A sixteenth-century poet, especially one who knew that he ought to be a curious and universal scholar, would possess some notions, perhaps not strictly philosophical, about the origin of the world and its end, the eduction of forms from matter, and the relation of such forms to the higher forms which are the model of the world and have their being in the mind of God. He might well be a poet to brood on those great complementary opposites: t.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 8d3e006 | The discords of our experience--delight in change, fear of change; the death of the individual and the survival of the species, the pains and pleasures of love, the knowledge of light and dark, the extinction and the perpetuity of empires--these were Spenser's subject; and they could not be treated without this third thing, a kind of time between time and eternity. He does not make it easy to extract philosophical notions from his text; but.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| dbfcecb | It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation,.. | Frank Kermode | ||
| 9ca647b | They went off to the Holy Land and went from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent-ORTHODOX ULTRA(r), now with more deep-healing power. | orthodoxy | Nathan Englander | |
| 4e5a205 | This was no coincidence. The best short stories and the most successful jokes have a lot in common. Each form relies on suggestion and economy. Characters have to be drawn in a few deft strokes. There's generally a setup, a reveal, a reversal, and a release. The structure is delicate. If one element fails, the edifice crumbles. In a novel you might get away with a loose line or two, a saggy paragraph, even a limp chapter. But in the joke an.. | Geraldine Brooks | ||
| 1a8b348 | His basic message is meant to put steel in their backbone and to encourage them to run the race and seek the prize of Heaven. He comes to remind them that they have an enemy who seeks to destroy them. 4. | John Bunyan | ||
| 6177c32 | Oh, the remembrance of my great sins, of my great temptations, and of my great fears of perishing forever! They bring afresh into my mind the remembrance of my great help, my great support from Heaven, and the great grace that God extended to such a wretch as I. | John Bunyan | ||
| 91460a1 | Why, man! Christ is so hid in God from the natural apprehensions of the flesh, that he cannot by any man be savingly known, unless God the Father reveals him to them. | John Bunyan | ||
| 4fdfee7 | admittance into the true church of Christ is based on regeneration, not merely on an affirmation of a creed or doctrine. The | John Bunyan | ||
| 72a1155 | Then the Interpreter took Christian by the hand and led him into a very large parlor that was full of dust because it was never swept. After He had reviewed it a little while, the Interpreter called for a man to come and sweep. Now when he began to sweep, the dust began to fly about so much and was so thick that Christian almost choked. Then said the Interpreter to a damsel who stood nearby, "Bring water, and sprinkle the room." When she ha.. | John Bunyan | ||
| 1fdcec5 | Though the hill is high, I still desire to walk up it. I don't care how difficult it is, because I understand that it leads to the way of life. | John Bunyan | ||
| 7907235 | The preeminent job of the church is to equip Christian for life's challenges. This requires the emphasis on being fitted with tested armor. He is tutored in the Word of God. He is encouraged to rely on the Lord alone through faith in His promises and providence. He is drilled in the doctrines of salvation and is encouraged to allow these truths to work themselves deep into his soul. He is encouraged to live righteously by having within him .. | John Bunyan | ||
| 2690c7e | Godly fear," wrote John Bunyan, flows from a sense of the love and kindness of God to the soul. Where there is no sense of hope of the kindness and mercy of God by Jesus Christ, there can be none of this fear, but rather wrath and despair, which produces a fear that is ... devilish; ... but godly fear flows from a sense of hope of mercy from God by Jesus Christ.2" | Jerry Bridges | ||
| f92f958 | For instance, I have seen many cry out against sin in the pulpit who yet abide it well enough in their own heart, home, and manner of life. "Potiphar's" | John Bunyan | ||
| 1915f09 | I would rather go through this valley to find the honor that true wise men seek than choose those things that this man and his worldly friends think most worthy of our affections." "Did" | John Bunyan | ||
| cb3a9e0 | Destruction. This pathway also represents a way that is not the straight way, also a way with a wide variety of many other religious and social philosophies. Danger | John Bunyan | ||
| 3833eac | For knowledge, great knowledge, may be obtained in the mysteries of the gospel, without any work of grace in the soul. You see, even if a man has all knowledge, he may still be nothing, and so, consequently, not be a child of God. | John Bunyan | ||
| bc845d7 | I'd advise you, then, to quickly get rid of your burden; for until then you'll never be settled in your mind or enjoy the benefits of the blessings that God has given you. | John Bunyan | ||
| 4173f18 | Wake up, see your own wretchedness, and fly to the Lord Jesus. He is the righteousness of God, for He Himself is God. Only by believing in His righteousness will you be delivered from condemnation. | John Bunyan | ||
| 8a311c5 | Another part or piece,' said Diabolus, 'of mine excellent armour, is a dumb and prayerless spirit, a spirit that scorns to cry for mercy, let the danger be ever so great; therefore be you, my Mansoul, sure that you make use of this. | bunyan prayer sin sin-nature spiritual spiritual-quotes spiritual-warfare war weapons | John Bunyan | |
| 2c24791 | John Bunyan in 'Christian Behavior', said, 'The whole Bible was given for this very end, that you should both believe this doctrine and live in the comfort and sweetness of it.' How can we live in the sweetness and comfort of doctrines if we don't know what they are? We must learn them first, and then we can live in the joy of them. If we are only exposed to a dab of doctrine here and there, this is impossible. | Nancy Wilson | ||
| 6750757 | You are not yet out of reach of the gunshot of the Devil. You have not yet resisted unto death in your striving against sin. Let the Kingdom be always before you, and believe with certainty and consistency the things that are yet unseen. Let nothing that is on this side of eternal life get inside you. Above all, take care of your own hearts, and resist the lusts that tempt you, for your hearts `are deceitful above all things, and desperatel.. | John Bunyan | ||
| ab004a0 | He loved us to the uttermost. And let us be so moved by this love that it becomes our own. | John Piper | ||
| 969b39b | She's his kid sister, but... I guess it's like she got sucked into this alternate dimension when she was little? And this demon guy taught her all this black magic and, like, twisted her soul. | Bryan Lee O'Malley | ||
| 702a424 | Obviously one of us went to Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters and one of us didn't." "Obviously one of is a total nerd." | nerd x-men | Bryan Lee O'Malley | |
| 901234f | Awe is the gateway to compassion. It is a deep awareness that we are creators, creators who work with the Creator, in an ongoing project of crafting a world. If we do not like the world or are afraid of it, we have had a hand in that. And if we made a mess, we can clean it up and do better. We are what we make. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| c0d7e98 | Home is more than a house. It is a sacred location, a place of aspiration and dreams, of learning and habit, of relationships and heart. Home is the geography of our souls. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 00ab919 | Here in the labyrinth, I struggle to find words to describe what I feel. Up on the mountaintop, I knew the language to describe God: majestic, transcendent, all-powerful, heavenly Father, Lord, and King. In this vocabulary, God remains stubbornly located in a few select places, mostly in external realms above or beyond: heaven, the church, doctrine, or the sacraments. What happens in the labyrinth seems vague, perhaps even theologically elu.. | Diana Butler Bass | ||
| 4b513ce | 1915. The year itself looks sepia and soiled-muddied like its pictures. In the snapshots everyone at first seems timid-lost-irresolute. Boys and men squinting at the camera. | Timothy Findley | ||
| eabdc3b | I can't work in a house where there's saints. The minute there's saints, the devil sends messengers | Timothy Findley | ||
| b559036 | The mud. There are no good similes. Mud must be a Flemish word. Mud was invented here. Mudland must have been its name. The ground is the colour of steel. Over most of the plain there isn't a trace of topsoil; only sand and clay. The Belgians call them 'clyttes', these fields, and the further you go towards the sea, the worse the clyttes become. In them, the water is reached by the plough at an average depth of eighteen inches. When it rain.. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 40cb8e6 | in a way being loved is like being told you never have to die. | Timothy Findley | ||
| 0ff4187 | Here was an unknown quantity-a child in breeches with a blue scarf wound around his neck whose job it was to get them out and back alive. This...was the greatest terror of war: what you didn't know of the men who told you what to do-where to go and when. What if they were mad-or stupid? What if their fear was greater than yours? Or what if they were brave and crazy-wanting and demanding bravery from you? He looked away. He thought of being .. | Timothy Findley | ||
| d5d05ff | Mrs Ross adjusted her veil but did not put the flask away... 'Why is this happening to us, Davenport? What does it mean - to kill your children? Kill them and then go in there and sing about it! What does that mean?' She wept-but angrily. | Timothy Findley |