I believe that our world was created with a sense of order. For every loss, there's a gain. Sometimes we're so blinded by the loss that we don't see the gain, don't recognize the gift.
Probably our lives are full of symbols which only an unacknowledged sense perceives. Spiritual events assume a material guise, in accordance with some creative principle, but do not insist on recognition. ("Absolute Evil")
Desire is both imitative (we like what others like) and competitive (we want to take away from others what they have). As children, we wanted to monopolize the attention of a parent, to draw it away from other siblings. This sense of rivalry... makes...
Use your good common sense. Is anger useful? If you get angry at someone, the result is good neither for you nor for the other person. Nothing helpful comes of it. In the end, anger does not harm others; it hurts yourself.
I know none of this seems very believable. It probably doesn't even make sense. But for once in your life, please, I am asking you to trust me. Trust yourself.
We live for today and have faith in tomorrow. We've learned from experience to enjoy what we have while it's ours, because the only thing we know for sure is that nothing is for sure or forever (scholars are right fond of calling this the 'southern s...
Before he got too far, he thought he smelled a fire. No sooner did he blink before he sensed something dire. He heard a sound and froze, danger tickling his nose. His ears perked up as tiny cries of capture rose.
As his (C. S. Lewis's) good friend Owen Barfield once remarked, Lewis radiated a sense that the spiritual world is home, that we are always coming back to a place we have never yet reached.
the automatic, fixed-action patterns of these animals work very well the great majority of the time. For example, because only healthy, normal turkey chicks make the peculiar sound of baby turkeys, it makes sense for mother turkeys to respond materna...
Charlotte Palmer is no sillier than Harriet Smith; and yet, how intolerable we should find it to see and hear as much of Charlotte as we do of Harriet! And would Miss Bates have been endurable if she had been presented in the mood and manners of Sens...
This unhoused, exiled Satan was perhaps the heavenly patron of all exiles, all unhoused people, all those who were torn from their place and left floating, half-this, half-that, denied the rooted person's comforting, defining sense of having solid gr...
One has only to set a loved human being against the fact that we are all in peril all the time to get back a sense of proportion. What does anything matter compared to the reality of love and its span, so brief at best, maintained against such odds?
I often find that people confuse inner peace with some sense of insensibility whenever something goes wrong. In such cases inner peace is a permit for destruction: The unyielding optimist will pretend that the forest is not burning either because he ...
Art in order to move you has to be political or sexual - whether it is on canvas, in the drum of the cello, in the words of the poet. If it doesn't move you, what is the point? And if it does move you, what is the point? The point is to touch your se...
For God to prove himself on demand, physically, would be a grave disappointment, and the strongest Christians should be considerably grateful that he chooses not to do so. The skeptic endlessly demands proof, yet God refuses to insult the true intell...
To reach only for that which pleasantly enchants you is the least of imagination, if even imagination at all, by the obvious reality of remaining within your means. The greater of imagination is parallel to risk. It extends beyond your comfort zone o...
On the one hand the younger son realizes that he has lost the dignity of his sonship, but at the same time that sense of lost dignity makes him also aware that he is indeed the son who had dignity to lose," (pp. 49).
...your mind was seizing on something to try to make sense of the emotion... Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day?
The attentions of others matter to us because we are afflicted by a congenital uncertainty as to our own value, as a result of which affliction we tend to allow others' appraisals to play a determining role in how we see ourselves. Our sense of ident...
Jasmine believes in a prophecy that says she is destined to love a man named Josh Toby. Okay, fine. He could believe that. Hell, he had friends who believed carbohydrates were the work of the devil. True love made sense at least.
It was the United States of America in the cold late spring of 1967, and the market was steady and the G.N.P. high and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose and it might have been a spring of brave hopes and nat...
