Simon Kampradt > Simon's Quotes

“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our lives. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness . . . But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to the day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Making All Things New: An Invitation to the Spiritual Life

“Are you saved?” asks the fundamentalist. “I am redeemed,” answers the Catholic, “and like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling, with hopeful confidence—but not with a false assurance—and I do all this as the Church has taught, unchanged, from the time of Christ.”
― Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on 'Romanism' by 'Bible Christians'

“Dyson and Tolkien were the immediate human causes of my conversion. Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“What will be left of all the fearing and wanting associated with your problematic life situation that every day takes up most of your attention? A dash, one or two inches long, between the date of birth and date of death on your gravestone.”
― Eckhart Tolle

“The restlessness in the human heart will never be finally stilled by any person, project, or place. The longing is eternal. This is what constantly qualifies and enlarges our circles of belonging. There is a constant and vital tension between longing and belonging. Without the shelter of belonging, our longings would lack direction, focus, and context; they would be aimless and haunted, constantly tugging the heart in a myriad of opposing directions. Without belonging, our longing would be demented. As memory gathers and anchors time, so does belonging shelter longing. Belonging without longing would be empty and dead, a cold frame around emptiness. One often notices this in relationships where the longing has died; they have become arrangements, and there is no longer any shared or vital presence. When longing dies, creativity ceases. The arduous task of being a human is to balance longing and belonging so that they work with and against each other to ensure that all the potential and gifts that sleep in the clay of the heart may be awakened and realized in this one life.”
― John O'Donohue, Eternal Echoes: Celtic Reflections on Our Yearning to Belong

“In almost nine cases out of ten, those who have once had the Faith but now reject it, or claim that it does not make sense, are driven not by reasoning but by the way they are living”
― Fulton J. Sheen, The Priest Is Not His Own

“Sometimes, the people that love you the most turn out to be the people you will trust the least.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Doubt is a subject which many Christians find both difficult an sensitive. They may see it as something shameful and disloyal, on the same level as heresy. As a result, it is something that they don't- or won't- talk about. They suppress it. Others fall into the opposite trap- they get totally preoccupied by doubt. They get overwhelmed by it. They lose sight of God by concentrating upon themselves. Yet doubt is something too important to be treated in either of these ways. Viewed positively, doubt provides opportunities for spiritual growth. It tests your faith, and shows you where it is vulnerable. It forces you to think about your faith, and not just take it for granted. It stimulates you to strengthen the foundations of your relationship with God.”
― Alister E. McGrath, Doubt: Handling it Honestly

“It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don't know at all that it is the same with others.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph

“Maybe, it is just enough to believe with a positive heart that people didn’t let you down. It could be just this: They couldn’t give you the compassion you really wanted based on where their heart is right now. Maybe, not now, but years later they will catch the memory of you in a quiet moment. There on that Sunday morning, a light will shine through the fog of lies, misunderstanding and frustration they built inside their angry mind about your true character. And, when it does, the shadows will be casted out to reveal a scared and hurt little boy or girl that just wanted to be loved, but went about it all wrong. Maybe, on that day, the whisper of their gratitude for your love will find its way back to your heart. And when that day comes, you will find yourself smiling all day long and not know why.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one's 'own' or one's 'real' life. The truth is of course that what one calls interruptions are precisely one's real life - the life God is sending one day by day; what one calls one's real life is a phantom of one's imagination.”
― C.S. Lewis, Letters of C. S. Lewis

“One thought-murder a day keeps the psychiatrist away.”
― Saul Bellow, Herzog

“In the days ahead, you will either be a mystic (one who has experienced God for real) or nothing at all.”
― Karl Rahner

“Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory....everything is forgotten, even a great love. That's what's sad about life, and also what's wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That's why it's good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.”
― Albert Camus, A Happy Death

“Whereas many people can find happiness by partaking in the ordinary trappings of life, creative people are especially susceptible to enduring an existential crisis, feeling that their life is aimless, irrational, and intolerably painful, especially when they are at an artistic impasse. The impelling act of using their imagination to create enduring artistic testaments is perhaps their only method to blunt the fateful feeling that it is useless to continue living in a world where life has no ultimate meaning, value, and purpose.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“G. K. Chesterton: “The most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.” And”
― Stephen Mansfield, The Search for God and Guinness: A Biography of the Beer that Changed the World

“Today is the first day of the rest of your existential crisis.”
― John McGill

“The discipline of creation, be it to paint, compose, write, is an effort towards wholeness.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.”
― Lord George Gordon Byron

“And then I felt sad because I realized that once people are broken in certain ways, they can't ever be fixed, and this is something nobody ever tells you when you are young and it never fails to surprise you as you grow older as you see the people in your life break one by one. You wonder when your turn is going to be, or if it's already happened.”
― Douglas Coupland, Life After God

“Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can't trust a person.”
― Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

“Stop punishing yourself for being someone with a heart. You cannot protect yourself from suffering. To live is to grieve. You are not protecting yourself by shutting yourself off from the world. You are limiting yourself.”
― Leigh Bardugo, King of Scars

“If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.”
― Evelyn Underhill

“An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“I think sometimes we fall in love just because it feels so good to love someone, to desire them, to yearn for another human being, to cross the boundary of aloneness that is part of human existence.”
― Jacqueline Simon Gunn, Where You'll Land

“The personality of Jesus emerged from the Gospels with astonishing consistency. Whenever they were written, they were written in the shadow of a personality so tremendous that Christians who may never have seen him knew him utterly: that strange mixture of unbearable sternness and heartbreaking tenderness.”
― Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy: A Heartrending Memoir of Love, Faith, Grief, and the Healing Power of God, Featuring Unseen Letters from C. S. Lewis

“To die will be an awfully big adventure.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

“There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.”
― Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942

“What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anaesthetic fog which we call “nature” or “the real world” fades away and the Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable?”
― Anonymous, The C. S. Lewis Bible: For Reading, Reflection, and Inspiration