"And but for our body one whole realm of God’s glory—all that we receive through the senses—would go unpraised. For the beasts can’t appreciate it and the angels are, I suppose, pure intelligences. They understand colours and tastes better than our greatest scientists; but have they retinas or palates? I fancy the “beauties of nature” are a secret God has shared with us alone. That may be one of the reasons why we were made—and why the resurrection of the body is an important doctrine."
— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
"It seems to me that we often, almost sulkily, reject the good that God offers us because, at that moment, we expected some other good. Do you know what I mean? On every level of our life—in our religious experience, in our gastronomic, erotic, aesthetic, and social experience—we are always harking back to some occasion which seemed to us to reach perfection, setting that up as a norm, and depreciating all other occasions by comparison. But these other occasions, I now suspect, are often full of their own new blessing, if only we would lay ourselves open to it."
— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
"If grace perfects nature it must expand all our natures into the full richness of the diversity which God intended when He made them, and Heaven will display far more variety than Hell."
— C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer
"Literature must be an ax to smash the frozen sea of the heart."
— Franz Kafka
"We need not expect that life leads to sitting and possessing — in no sense, at no moment. We cannot remain standing; we may not; and we ought not even once wish to do so. Whatever awaits us on our way is under no circumstances our goal. Even the most important, the beautiful, the tragic moments of our lives, are only stations on the way, nothing more. Saying farewell: that is the great rule of this life. Woe to us if we reject this rule, if we want to remain standing, calling a halt, and attaching ourselves to a particular station. There is nothing left for us but to acknowledge this saying farewell, becoming obedient to it. “Here we have no lasting city."
— Karl Barth, in a sermon on the final Sunday of 1913 (via Bruce McCormack’s Kantzer Lectures)
(Source: wesleyhill)
