With next Wednesday being Independence Day, many of us will likely be posting quotes from the Founding Fathers. Just after publishing several such quotes in our ladies’ ministry newsletter a few years ago, I discovered to my chagrin that many of them had no historical verification. There is a great article called Unconfirmed Quotations at the Wallbuilders site which discusses several of those quotes. Hopefully this will save some of you the embarrassment I suffered. 🙂
Incidentally, Wallbuilders, “an organization dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built,” has a number of great articles here.
Click on the WFMW graphic above to visit Shannon’s site for a wealth of great tips.
1. To be popular at home is a great achievement. The man who is loved by the house cat, by the dog, by the neighbor’s children, and by his own wife, is a great man, even if he has never had his name in Who’s Who. ~ Thomas Dreier
2. “A man’s children and his garden both reflect the amount of weeding done during the growing season.” ~Author Unknown
3. “A father is a guy who has snapshots in his wallet where his money used to be.” ~ Author Unknown
4. “None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of SUCH a Father who has not his equal in this world-so great, so good, so faultless. Try, all of you, to follow in his footsteps and don’t be discouraged, for to be really in everything like him none of you, I am sure, will ever be. Try, therefore, to be like him in some points, and you will have acquired a great deal.” ~ Victoria, Queen of England
5. “It is a wise father that knows his own child.” ~ William Shakespeare
6. He who is taught to live upon little owes more to his father’s wisdom than he who has a great deal left him does to his father’s care. ~ William Penn
7. A father is someone you look up to, no matter how tall you grow.
8. Fathers are people who give their daughters away to other men who aren’t nearly good enough so they can have grandchildren who are smarter than any body’s.
9. The father will be too small or too busy to interest the big boy if he counts himself too big or too busy to be interested in the little boy. ~ Elisabeth Elliot
10. “By profession I am a soldier and take pride in that fact. But I am prouder, infinitely prouder, to be a father.” ~ General Douglas MacArthur
11.“One father is more than a hundred schoolmasters.” George Herbert
12. By the time a man realizes that his father was usually right, he has a son who thinks he’s usually wrong.
13. If you want your child to talk to you when he is 15, listen to him when he is 5.
“It is, in a way, an odd thing to honor those who died in defense of our country in wars far away. The imagination plays a trick. We see these soldiers in our mind as old and wise. We see them as something like the Founding Fathers, grave and gray-haired. But most of them were boys when they died; they gave up two lives — the one they were living and the one they would have lived. When they died, they gave up their chance to be husbands and fathers and grandfathers. They gave up their chance to be revered old men. They gave up everything for their county, for us.
All we can do is remember.”
~ Ronald Wilson Reagan
Remarks at Veteran’s Day ceremony, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, November 11, 1985
The purpose of all war is peace. –Saint Augustine
But the freedom that they fought for,
and the country grand they wrought for,
Is their monument to-day, and for aye.
~Thomas Dunn English
All we have of freedom, all we use or know – This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
~Rudyard Kipling, “The Old Issue,” 1899
Posterity: you will never know how much it has cost my generation to preserve your freedom. I hope you will make good use of it.
~John Quincy Adams
1. Not everything you face can be changed, but everything you change must first be faced.
2. Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present. — Dale Carnegie
3. Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless. — Thomas Edison<
4. You are the only person on earth who can use your ability.
5. If there’s no wind, row.
6. The best way to forget your own problems is to help someone else with theirs.
7. The best thing to do behind a friend’s back is to pat it. — Ruth Brillhart
8. Be kind. Every person you meet is fighting a hard battle.
9. Fall seven times. Stand up eight.
10. God gives and forgives. Man gets and forgets.
11. We don’t have to attend every argument we’re invited to.
12. The pain of self-discipline is less than the pain of regret.
13. Don’t believe everything you think.
Bonus: The road to success is dotted with many tempting parking places.
Bonus #2: How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving, and tolerant of the weak and the strong — because someday in life you will be all of these.
–George Washington Carver
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Some weeks ago I finished Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis and started writing a review, but got distracted and busy and haven’t gotten back to it. I do intend to finish it soon: one difficulty is that there are a number of good quotes from the book I want to use, but if I use all of them it would make for an exceptionally long post.
One quote, however, has been on my mind, and I wanted to go ahead and post it separately. It’s from the chapter “Beyond Personality” in a section that discusses the dilemma of how you can sometimes have an unsaved person who is actually nicer than some Christians. Lewis goes into many reasons for that which I won’t reproduce here, but one reason has to do with general disposition. Person A may be a quieter, calmer person and generally nice and personable, yet unsaved. Person B may have a more excitable personality and a fiery temper which the Lord has been giving him grace to overcome, and he may be a lot better than he was, yet compared with Person A he doesn’t seem as nice. Lewis then goes on to say (emphasis mine):
If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. “Why drag God into it?” you may ask. A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by s*x, or dipsomania, or nervousness, or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and (between ourselves) you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing: and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered….
If you are a nice person — if virtue comes easily to you — beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God’s gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel: and all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The Devil was an archangel once; his natural gifts were as far above yours as your are above those of a chimpanzee.
….We must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world — and might even be more difficult to save.
For mere improvement is no redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.
If what you want is an argument against Christianity (and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true) you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, “So there’s your boasted new man! Give me the old kind.” But if you once have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people’s souls — of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbors or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the anesthetic 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?
Our Lord has written the promise of resurrection, not in books alone but in every leaf of springtime.–Martin Luther
Spring bursts to-day,
For Christ is risen and all the earth’s at play.
— Christina Georgina Rossetti, Easter Carol
Was it not most meet that a woman should first see the risen Saviour? She was first in the transgression; let her be first in the justification. In yon garden she was first to work our woe; let her in that other garden be the first to see Him who works our weal. She takes first the apple of that bitter tree which brings us all our sorrow; let her be the first to see the Mighty Gardener, who has planted a tree which brings forth fruit unto everlasting life.
We greatly need the cheer of this precious Easter truth. We make too little of the place our Lord has gone to prepare for us. We rob ourselves greatly when we try to reduce heaven to a mere state of ecstatic feeling. We need the cheer which comes of having the eye of faith fixed on the better country and the city that hath the foundations. Such a certainty of an inheritance that is real and that cannot fade away goes far to mitigate the pangs which come of the fires and floods and disasters and frauds which so often despoil God’s people of their earthly possessions; for we know that the things seen are temporal, but the things not seen are eternal, and they are only a few heart-beats away.
— E.P. Goodwin
IF you come to seek His face, not in the empty sepulchre, but in the living power of His presence, as indeed realizing that He has finished His glorious work, and is alive for evermore, then your hearts will be full of true Easter joy, and that joy will shed itself abroad in your homes. And let your joy not end with the hymns and the prayers and the communions in His house. Take with you the joy of Easter to the home, and make that home bright with more unselfish love, more hearty service; take it into your work, and do all in the name of the Lord Jesus; take it to your heart, and let that heart rise anew on Easter wings to a higher, a gladder, a fuller life; take it to the dear grave-side and say there the two words “Jesus lives!” and find in them the secret of calm expectation, the hope of eternal reunion.
— John Ellerton
The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the birth of a new, glorious, immortal life on the realms of the midnight of death, the rising of the new sun on the terrors of darkness and night. It is the opening of a bright and noble highway to Heaven where everything had been closed and sealed and every hope withered. The resurrection of Christ not only lifts darkness and dread from the tomb but also spans the abyss which separates us from our loved dead and puts into us the strength and hope of a glorious reunion. — E.M. Bounds
God expects from men something more…at such times, and that it were much to be wished for the credit of their religion as well as the satisfaction of their conscience that their Easter devotions would in some measure come up to their Easter dress.
— Robert South
I’ll be back later this evening with Psalm Sunday, but for now I wanted to put up the first of a series of quotes about Easter (or Resurrection Day, if you prefer). For past holidays I have put a series of quotes all in one post, but some of these are really meaty, and I think they’d lose their effectiveness all together. So I am going to post one or two a day throughout this week.
As I collected these through the years, I did note the author, but not where I found the quote — one of the changes experienced in becoming a blogger is keeping track of sources to link to. 🙂 But since I don’t have the source for these (except for this first one), I will just post them as I have them in my files.
“Easter is not primarily a comfort, but a challenge. If it is true [as he and others indeed demonstrate], then it is the supreme fact of history, and to fail to adjust one’s life to its implications means irreparable loss.”
— J.N.D. Anderson, late Dean of the School of Law at the University of London, The Evidence for the Resurrection (Downer’s Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 1966), p. 4. (I haven’t read this book — all I know about it is this quote.)
On this side of the resurrection the cross is no less vulgar–the vulgarity of the cross is the vulgarity of the sin that erected it–but the cross flames with light, the light of the glory of the grace of God, Who took sin into His own heart and canceled it by the shedding of blood. —G. Campbell Morgan
A few spring quotes and spring poems for your enjoyment. 🙂
March bustles in on windy feet
And sweeps my doorstep and my street.
She washes and cleans with pounding rains,
Scrubbing the earth of winter stains.
She shakes the grime from carpet green
Till naught but fresh new blades are seen.
Then, house in order, all neat as a pin,
She ushers gentle springtime in.
– Susan Reiner, Spring Cleaning
No matter how long the winter, spring is sure to follow.
– Proverb from Guinea
Only with winter-patience can we bring
The deep-desired, long-awaited spring.
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh
If I had my life to live over, I would start barefoot earlier in the spring and stay that way later in the fall.
– Nadine Stair
If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant:
if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.
— Anne Bradstreet, Meditations Divine and Moral, 1655
“Earth laughs in flowers.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
WELCOME TO SPRING
We must live through the dreary winter
If we would value the spring;
And the woods must be cold and silent
Before the robins sing.
The flowers must be buried in darkness
Before they can bud and bloom,
And the sweetest, warmest sunshine
Comes after the storm and gloom.
–Anonymous
(Most of the graphics are from an old set from Graphic Garden.)
Stray Thoughts 