These are quotes which stood out to me, possibly for use in a sermon someday. Their presence here does not mean I agree with them, it merely shows that I might want to reference them later. The default view is five random selections. Use the tag list on the right to view all quotes relevant to that theme.
To say of an act done, "My conscience is quite clear",
sounds smug and satisfactory. It does not by any means follow
that the speaker's conscience ought to be clear. It may simply
show that [it] is sadly unenlightened.
id: 1431 | source: Bishop G. E. Reindorp | tags: Conscience, Guilt, Self-awareness, Sin
Silence is golden... but, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.
To thine own self be true, but when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
It’s never too late to learn, but you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.
Good things come in small packages, but the bigger the better
Two’s company, three’s a crowd, but the more the merrier
Better safe than sorry, but nothing ventured, nothing gained
Never judge a book by it’s cover, but clothes make the man
Out of sight, out of mind, but absence makes the heart grow fonder
Actions speak louder than words, but the pen is mightier than the sword
To do a great work, a man must be very idle as well as very industrious. –
If God does not enter your kitchen, there is something wrong with your kitchen. If you can’t take God into your recreation, there is something wrong with your play. We all believe in the God of the heroic. What we need most these days is the God of the humdrum, the commonplace, the everyday. -- Peter Marshall, Sr.
id: 2331 | source: Anonymous | tags: Spiritual Formation
The book also has a good chapter on "Amazing Coincidences." These are strange events which appear to give evidence of supernatural influences operating in everyday life. They are not the result of deliberate fraud or trickery, but only of the laws of probability. The paradoxical feature of the laws of probability is that they make unlikely events happen unexpectedly often. A simple way to state the paradox is Littlewood's Law of Miracles. Littlewood was a famous mathematician who was teaching at Cambridge University when I was a student. Being a professional mathematician, he defined miracles precisely before stat-ing his law about them. He defined a miracle as an event that has special significance when it occurs, but oc-curs with a probability of one in a million. This definition agrees with our common-sense understanding of the word "miracle."
Littlewood's Law of Miracles states that in the course of any normal person's life, miracles happen at a rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple. During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of about one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day, or about a million per month. With few exceptions, these events are not miracles because they are insignificant. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events. Therefore we should expect about one miracle to happen, on the average, every month. Broch tells stories of some amazing coincidences that happened to him and his friends, all of them easily explained as consequences of Littlewood's Law.
id: 2575 | source: Freeman Dyson in Ny Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16991 March 25, 2004 | tags: Atheism, Miracles, Statistics