N.D. Wilson Quotes
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Living is the same thing as dying. Living well is the same thing as dying for others.
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Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it. The greatest heroes stand because it is right to do so, not because they believe they will walk away with their lives. Such selfless courage is a victory in itself.
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Summer has come with the loveliness of a mother Heat, not warmth, now pours onto my face, aging me, taking me closer to death. Let it. I am here to live my story, to love my story. I will not fail to savor any gift out of a desire for self-preservation. Self-preservation is not a great virtue in this story.
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Tom had traveled around the sun eleven times when the delivery truck brought his mother's newest fridge, but a number doesn't really describe his age.
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Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain - they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter.
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Drink your wine. Laugh from your gut. Burden your moments with thankfulness. Be as empty as you can be when that clock winds down. Spend your life. And if time is a river, may you leave a wake.
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In Bright Shadow: C.S. Lewis on the Imagination for Theology and Discipleship
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The moon was up, painting the world silver, making things look just a little more alive.
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We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.
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Hold your tongue if you'd like to keep it." - Jaques
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Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.
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If you knew the meaning of life, would you necessarily like it?
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Do not slip into writing for the mind and the mind alone. In other words, do not play merely upon our ability to reason. And do not focus only on visuals. Write for the whole person.
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Narrative living is the beginning of rhetoric.
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The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.
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Imagine a poem written with such enormous three-dimensional words that we had to invent a smaller word to reference each of the big ones; that we had to rewrite the whole thing in shorthand, smashing it into two dimensions, just to talk about it. Or don’t imagine it. Look outside. Human language is our attempt at navigating God’s language; it is us running between the lines of His epic, climbing on the vowels and building houses out of the consonants.
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Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.
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Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side.
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Stories are like catechisms, but they're catechisms for your impulses, they're catechisms with flesh on.
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Do you dislike your role in the story, your place in the shadow? What complaints do you have that the hobbits could not have heaved at Tolkien? You have been born into a narrative, you have been given freedom. Act, and act well until you reach your final scene.
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As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me.
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Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it.
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Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shenikah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.
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Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud.)
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I've watched goldfish make babies, and ants execute earwigs. I've seen a fly deliver live young while having its head eaten by a mantis. And I had a golden retriever behave like one.
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Kansas is not easily impressed. It has seen houses fly and cattle soar. When funnel clouds walk through the wheat, big hail falls behind. As the biggest stones melt, turtles and mice and fish and even men can be seen frozen inside. And Kansas is not surprised. Henry York had seen things in Kansas, things he didn't think belonged in this world. Things that didn't. Kansas hadn't flinched.
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Going where no man has gone before is more difficult than it sounds. Our cousins and ancestors were no less curious than we are, and were perhaps bolder. This world is their tomb. You should look under the bed.
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Self-loathing and self-worship can easily be the same thing. You hate the small sack of fluids and resentments that you are, and you would go to any length, and betray anything and anyone, to preserve it.
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Descartes, the Frenchman, had little trouble knowing that he existed.
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Understand this: we are both tiny and massive. We are nothing more than molded clay given breath, but we are nothing less than divine self-portraits, huffing and puffing along the mountain ranges of epic narrative arcs prepared for us by the Infinite Word Himself.
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