All charming people, I fancy, are spoiled. It is the secret of their attraction.

One reason why the Enemy found this so east was that, without knowing it, I was already desperately anxious to get rid of my religion; and that for a reason worth recording. By a sheer mistake - and I still believe it to have been an honest mistake - in spiritual technique I had rendered my private practice of that religion a quiet intolerable burden. It came about in this way. Like everyone else I had been told as a child that one must not only say one's prayers but think abut what one was saying. Accordingly, when I came to a serious belief, I tried to put this into practice. At first it seemed plain sailing. But soon the false conscience (St. Paul's 'Law', Herbert's 'prattler') came into play. One had no sooner reached 'Amen' than it whispered, 'Yes. But are you sure you were really thinking about what you said?'; then, more subtly, 'Were you, for example, thinking about it as well as you did last night?' The answer, for reasons I did not then understand, was nearly always No. 'Very well,' said the voice, 'hadn't you, then, better try it over again?' And one obeyed; but of course with no assurance that the second attempt would be any better...I set myself a standard. No clause of my prayer was to be allowed to pass muster unless it was accompanied by what I called a 'realization,' by which I meant a certain vivedness of the imagination and the affections. My nightly task was to produce by sheer will power a phenomenon which will power could never produce, which was so ill-defined that I could never say with absolute confidence whether it had occurred, and which, even when it did occur, was of very mediocre spiritual value.

C.S. Lewis

Look at the language. If a scientist delivers the simple, unconditional, absolutely certain statements that politicians and journalists want, he is talking as an activist, not a scientist.

Daniel Gardner

I'm not going to limit myself just because people won't accept the fact that I can do something else.

Dolly Parton

All that I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Marriage has historically been in the domain of the States to regulate.

Corrine Brown

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

J.K. Rowling

I didn't know that anything was wrong with me until the media got involved in my life.

Kelly Osbourne

The (Christian) doctrines are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection

C.S. Lewis

You don't have to be great to get started, but you do have to get started to be great.

Lee J. Colan, Sticking to It

Expectations are a form of first-class truth: If people believe it, it's true.

Bill Gates

Great music is its own movie, already. And the challenge, as a music fan, is to keep the song as powerful as it wants to be, to not tamper with it and to somehow give it a home.

Cameron Crowe

For what I have received may the Lord make me truly thankful. And more truly for what I have not received.

Storm Jameson