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Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.
--Tom Robbins
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon.
--Susan Ertz
Self-consciously Christian (or Jewish or Muslim) writing will be sectarian and tend to propaganda and therefore have very little to say to persons outside that particular faith community. The challenge for those of us who care about our faith and about a hurting world is to tell stories which will carry the words of grace and hope in their bones and sinews and not wear them like fancy dress.
-- Katherine Paterson
It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.
-- George MacDonald
Knowledge is happiness, because to have knowledge---broad, deep knowledge---is to know true ends from false, and lofty things from low. To know the thoughts and deeds that have marked man's progress is to feel the great heart-throbs of humanity through the centuries; and if one does not feel in these pulsations a heavenward striving, one must indeed be deaf to the harmonies of life.
-- Helen Keller (1880-1968); 'The Story of My Life',1903.
Up to the age of 30 or beyond it, poetry of many kinds...gave me great pleasure, and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare....formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost any taste for pictures or music....I retain some taste for scenery, but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which if formerly did....My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this shoud have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive....The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.
-- Charles Darwin
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
--Aristotle
But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!
-- George MacDonald
Half of knowledge is to know where to find it.
--Montaigne
We need to study not only God's Word but also God's world....We need to study not only Isaiah but also industry. Not only Philemon but also politics. Not only Acts but arts. It is not for us to choose between knowing the Bible or the world; we need to know the world biblically.
-- Paul Marshall
The Holy Spirit does not work just on the left brain. He also works on the right brain: he sparks our imagination, causes us to rejoice, laugh, sing, and create. Few Christians are engaged and fully committed to the arts today. Where are the hymn writers? Where are the novelists? Painters? Playwrights? A very high-powered editor of a Christian magazine told me two weeks ago that he knows of only one exceptional Christian fiction writer. What are our seminaries doing to encourage these right brainers? What is the Church doing to encourage them?
-- Dan Wallace
Contributors:
Bryan Collins
Karen Knott
Charles Johnson
Barry Brake
Jeff Lawrence