Lovely flowers are the smiles of God’s goodness.
– William Wilberforce
Philosophy
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
– Augustine
Philosophy | Men | Nature
The least movement is of importance to all nature. The entire ocean is affected by a pebble.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy | Nature
A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.
– Francis Bacon
Philosophy | Atheism
It is the fight alone that pleases us, not the victory.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy | Victory
We account the Scriptures of God to be the most sublime philosophy. I find more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history whatever.
– Isaac Newton
Scripture | Philosophy | Christianity
No philosophical theory which I have yet come across is a radical improvement on the words of Genesis, that ‘In the beginning God made Heaven and Earth’.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Scripture | Truth
Love, and do what you like.
– Augustine
Love | Philosophy
Now I believe I can hear the philosophers protesting that it can only be misery to live in folly, illusion, deception and ignorance, but it isn’t -it’s human.
– Desiderius Erasmus
Philosophy | Life | Deception
To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy
The most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy | Crime
The weather and my mood have little connection. I have my foggy and my fine days within me; my prosperity or misfortune has little to do with the matter.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy
When a nation’s young men are conservative, its funeral bell is already rung.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Philosophy | Youth
Continuous eloquence wearies. Grandeur must be abandoned to be appreciated. Continuity in everything is unpleasant. Cold is agreeable, that we may get warm.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy
Nature is an infinite sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy | Nature
When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy
If we must not act save on a certainty, we ought not to act on religion, for it is not certain. But how many things we do on an uncertainty, sea voyages, battles!
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy
Let it not be said that I have said nothing new. The arrangement of the material is new.
– Blaise Pascal
Philosophy
Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
Praise the sea, but keep on the land.
– George Herbert
Philosophy
The nescience of the Agnostic philosophy is the proof from experience that to be carnally minded is Death.
– Henry Drummond
Philosophy
Most mothers are instinctive philosophers.
– Harriet Beecher Stowe
Mothers | Philosophy
When you invite a middle-aged moralist to address you, I suppose I must conclude that you have a taste for middle-aged moralizing.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Age
Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the deserts that our lives have already become.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
Reasoning is never, like poetry, judged from the outside at all.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Judging
We have had enough, once and for all, of Hedonism–the gloomy philosophy which says that Pleasure is the only good.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
This moment contains all moments.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
In the country of the blind the one eyed man is king.
– Desiderius Erasmus
Philosophy
Allegories are fine ornaments and good illustrations, but not proof.
– Martin Luther
Philosophy
All slang is metaphor, and all metaphor is poetry.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
One hour’s sleep before midnight is worth three after.
– George Herbert
Philosophy
Victories that are cheap are cheap. Those only are worth having which come as the result of hard fighting.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Philosophy
Often the cockloft is empty in those whom nature hath built many stories high.
– Thomas Fuller
Philosophy
Art can teach without at all ceasing to be art.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
It does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.
– Phillips Brooks
Philosophy
A yawn is a silent shout.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
When men comfort themselves with philosophy, ’tis not because they have got two or three sentences, but because they have digested those sentences, and made them their own: philosophy is nothing but discretion.
– John Selden
Philosophy | Discretion | Men
In India an ox with blindfolded eyes goes round an oil-press all the day long. When his eyes are unbandaged in the evening he finds that he has been going round and round in a circle and that although he has succeeded in producing some oil he has gone no further. Although the philosophers have been at it for hundreds of years, they have not reached their goal. Now and then, after much labor they have produced a little oil, which they have left behind them, but it is not sufficient to meet the sore need of mankind.
– Sadhu Sundar Singh
Philosophy
Man, in his own wisdom, has developed a vast number of philosophies and theories seeking to explain one’s thoughts, words, and actions. In doing so, man has pridefully sought to deny his own sinfulness and has confused any clear definition of God’s standards of right and wrong.
– John C. Broger
Philosophy
How many denominate themselves Christians, though the Christianity they embrace is simply a kind of philosophy of life or of ethics, a few articles of truth, or some supernatural manifestations.
– Watchman Nee
Christians | Philosophy
All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
Wherefore all theology, when separated from Christ, is not only vain and confused, but is also mad, deceitful, and spurious; for, though the philosophers sometimes utter excellent sayings, yet they have nothing but what is short-lived, and even mixed up with wicked and erroneous sentiments.
– John Calvin
Theology | Philosophy
Only the skilled can judge the skillfulness, but that is not the same as judging the value of the result.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
He that will keep a monkey should pay for the glasses he breaks.
– John Selden
Philosophy | Animals
The allegory of a sophist is always screwed; it crouches and bows like a snake, which is never straight, whether she go, creep, or lie still; only when she is dead, she is straight enough.
– Martin Luther
Philosophy
Memory is the treasure house of the mind wherein the monuments thereof are kept and preserved.
– Thomas Fuller
Philosophy
The renaissance of Christian philosophy has been accompanied by a resurgence of interest in natural theology, that branch of theology that seeks to prove God’s existence apart from divine revelation.
– William Lane Craig
Philosophy | Theology
Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.
– Thomas Aquinas
Philosophy
If we cut up beasts simply because they cannot prevent us and because we are backing our own side in the struggle for existence, it is only logical to cut up imbeciles, criminals, enemies, or capitalists for the same reasons.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Enemies | Struggles
Man’s conquest of Nature turns out, in the moment of its consummation, to be Nature’s conquest of Man.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
Science leads us to its boundaries where it introduces us to philosophy.
– Dr. Edgar Andrews
Philosophy
Art consists of limitation. The most beautiful part of every picture is the frame.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy | Beauty
It is difficult to estimate how much of the world’s philosophy, ethics, knowledge, research, and science flow from the powers of darkness. But of one point we are certain: all arguments and proud obstacles against the knowledge of God are the fortresses of the enemy.
– Watchman Nee
Philosophy | Satan | Knowledge
Grant what thou commandest and then command what thou wilt.
– Augustine
Philosophy
Men have presented their plans and philosophies for the remedying of earth’s ills, but Jesus stands alone in presenting not a system, but His own personality as capable of supplying the needs of the soul.
– A. C. Dixon
Philosophy
By-and-by never comes.
– Augustine
Philosophy
Let’s get rid of the inhuman philosophy which only allows necessities. Not only does it wrongly deprive us of legitimate enjoyment of God’s generosity, but it cannot be affected without depriving man of all his senses, reducing him to a block.
– John Calvin
Philosophy
To fight in another man’s armour is something more than to be influenced by his style of fighting.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
Coincidences are spiritual puns.
– G.K. Chesterton
Philosophy
A firm faith is the best theology; a good life is the best philosophy; a clear conscience the best law; honesty, the best policy, and temperance the best physic.
– James H. Aughey
Faith | Theology | Philosophy
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
– Henry Ward Beecher
Philosophy
Every powerful movement has had its philosophy which has gripped the mind, fired the imagination and captured the devotion of its adherents.
– John Stott
Philosophy
The human mind has no more power of inventing a new value than of planting a new sun in the sky or a new primary colour in the spectrum.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
Without God man has no reference point to define himself. 20th century philosophy manifests the chaos of man seeking to understand himself as a creature with dignity while having no reference point for that dignity.
– R. C. Sproul
Philosophy
The words printed here are concepts. You must go through the experiences.
– Augustine
Philosophy
Truth without enthusiasm, morality without emotion, ritual without soul, are things Christ unsparingly condemned. Destitute of fire, they are nothing more than a godless philosophy, an ethical system, and a superstition.
– Samuel Chadwick
Truth | Philosophy
You cannot study pleasure in the moment of the nuptial embrace, nor repentance while repenting, nor analyze the nature of humour while roaring with laughter.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy | Laughter
If true happiness depended on the thoughts of man, then all philosophers and deep thinkers would be filled to overflowing with it.
– Sadhu Sundar Singh
Happiness | Philosophy
Christians must understand the nature of the change that has occurred in our culture. No longer do the secularists just mock Christians from afar. They are now actively campaigning to indoctrinate children in an anti-God philosophy–to teach them to be secularists and atheists.
– Ken Ham
Rebellion | Philosophy
Philosophy is a proud, sullen detector of the poverty and misery of man. It may turn him from the world with a proud, sturdy contempt; but it cannot come forward and say, here are rest, grace, pardon, peace, strength, and consolation.
– Richard Cecil
Philosophy
A name is a kind of face whereby one is known.
– Thomas Fuller
Philosophy
Every poem can be considered in two ways–as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy
Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.
– Philip Yancey
Philosophy
Wherever you are – be all there.
– Jim Elliot
Philosophy | Life
Moderation is the center wherein all philosophies, both human and divine, meet.
– Joseph Hall
Philosophy
Excess in meat and drink clouds the mind, chokes good affections, and provokes lust. Many a man digs his own grave with his teeth.
– Thomas Manton
Philosophy
I doubt if a single individual could be found from the whole of mankind free from some form of insanity. The only difference is one of degree. A man who sees a gourd and takes it for his wife is called insane because this happens to very few people.
– Desiderius Erasmus
Philosophy
Let your discourse with men of business be short and comprehensive.
– George Washington
Philosophy | Business
What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.
– Augustine
Philosophy | Time
The loftier the building, the deeper must the foundation be laid.
– Thomas a Kempis
Philosophy
He that is not handsome at 20, nor strong at 30, nor rich at 40, nor wise at 50, will never be handsome, strong, rich or wise.
– George Herbert
Finances | Philosophy
The secularists, the humanists, the liberals–those who have no use for God–continue to do what they want to do, not realizing that their philosophy is flawed and will fail. One day it will be too late for many of them.
– Shelton Smith
Humanism | Philosophy
Who can map out the various forces at play in one soul? Man is a great depth, O Lord. The hairs of his head are easier by far to count than his feeling, the movements of his heart.
– Augustine
Philosophy
Consciousness is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.
– C.S. Lewis
Philosophy