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Literary Historian Inspirational Quotes (5894)

Page 15 of 246
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The Frenchman works until he can play. The American works until he can’t play and then thanks the devil, his master, that he is donkey enough to die in harness. But the Englishman, as he has since become, works until he can pretend that he never worked at all.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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Prayer is request. The essence of request, as distinct from compulsion, is that it may or may not be granted. And if an infinitely wise Being listens to the requests of finite and foolish creatures, of course He will sometimes grant and sometimes refuse them.
C. S. Lewis
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Organic growth is a cyclical process it is just as true to say that the oak is a potential acorn as it is to say the acorn is a potential oak. But the process of writing a poem, of making any art object, is not cyclical but a motion in one direction toward a definite end.
W. H. Auden
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You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.
C. S. Lewis
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God made us: invented us as a man invents an engine. A car is made to run on petrol, and it would not run properly on anything else. Now God designed the human machine to run on Himself.
C. S. Lewis
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May it not be that, just as we have to have faith in Him, God has to have faith in us and, considering the history of the human race so far, may it not be that 'faith' is even more difficult for Him than it is for us?
W. H. Auden
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A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having read.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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The word in language is half someone else’s… it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own.
Mikhail Bakhtin
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Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.
C. S. Lewis
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If Darwin had seen in life what Dostoevsky saw, he would not have talked of the law of the preservation of species, but of its destruction.
Lev Shestov
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I suggest to you that it is because God loves us that he gives us the gift of suffering. Pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. You see, we are like blocks of stone out of which the Sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of his chisel, which hurt us so much are what make us perfect.
C. S. Lewis
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You Too? I thought I was the only one.
C. S. Lewis
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Lives the man that can figure a naked Duke of Windlestraw addressing a naked House of Lords?
Thomas Carlyle
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If the world becomes pagan and perishes, the last man left alive would do well to quote the Iliad and die.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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To those who have lived long together, everything heard and everything seen recalls some pleasure communicated, some benefit conferred, some petty quarrel or some slight endearment. Esteem of great powers, or amiable qualities newly discovered may embroider a day or a week, but a friendship of twenty years is interwoven with the texture of life.
Samuel Johnson
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If you ask why we should obey God, in the last resort the answer is, 'I am.' To know God is to know that our obedience is due to Him.
C. S. Lewis
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Literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech.
Terry Eagleton
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The reason that angels fly is that they take themselves so lightly.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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A fellow will hack half a year at a block of marble to make something in stone that hardly resembles a man. The value of statuary is owing to its difficulty. You would not value the finest head cut upon a carrot.
Samuel Johnson
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The present is only understandable through the past, with which it forms a living continuity and the past is always grasped from our own partial viewpoint within the present.
Terry Eagleton
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The original quality in any man of imagination is imagery.
Gilbert K. Chesterton
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My books are friends that never fail me.
Thomas Carlyle
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More like the real thing,' said the lord Digory softly. - The Last Battle
C. S. Lewis
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In a different time, in a different place, it is always some other side of our common human nature that has been developing itself. The actual truth is the sum of all these.
Thomas Carlyle
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