“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Socrates, quoted in Neil Postman Building a Bridge to the 18th Century (and about 10 million other places)
“We cannot begin by forming independently a theory of how God is knowable and then seek to test it out or indeed to actualize it and fill it with material content. How God can be known must be determined from first to last by the way in which He actually is known.”
Thomas Torrance in 1969, quoted approvingly in John Polkinghorne The Faith of a Physicist
“something has to be overcome before we can cut up a dead man or a live animal in a dissecting room…. We do not look at trees either as Dryads or as beautiful objects while we cut them into beams: the first man who did so may have felt the price keenly, and the bleeding trees in Virgil and Spenser may be far-off echoes of that primeval sense of impiety. The stars lost their divinity as astronomy developed, and the Dying God has no place in chemical agriculture.”
C.S. Lewis The Abolition of Man
“Well, if that’s what you call being at peace, for heaven’s sake just warn me before you go to war, will you?”
The main character in Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt
“If I profess with the loudest voice and clearest exposition every portion of the truth of God except precisely that little point which the world and the devil are at the moment attacking, I am not confessing Christ, however boldly I may be professing Christ. Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved. And to be steady on all the battle fields besides is merely flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
Martin Luther, quoted among many other places by https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/657155-if-i-profess-with-the-loudest-voice-and-clearest-exposition
“In the first place, divest yourself of all bias in favor of novelty and singularity of opinion. Indulge them in any other subject rather than that of religion. It is too important, and the consequences of error may be too serious. On the other hand, shake off all the fears and servile prejudices, under which weak minds are servilely crouched. Fix reason firmly in her seat, and call to her tribunal every fact, every opinion. Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
Thomas Jefferson, in a 1787 letter to his orphan nephew Peter Carr, quoted in William Bennett The Book of Virtues
“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it; in other words, we would never travel by sea if it meant never talking about it, and for the sheer pleasure of seeing things we could never hope to describe to others.”
Blaise Pascal Pensées
“For to feel oneself a martyr, as everybody knows, is a pleasurable thing, and the true tragedy of my position was that I had passed that stage. I had enjoyed what sweets it had to offer in ever dwindling degree since the middle of August…”
Erskine Childers The Riddle of the Sands