Quote Library

Jealousy

As to Bell’s talking telegraph, it only creates interest in scientific circles... its commercial values will be limited... -- Elisha Gray, telephone inventor runner-up, June 1876

Jesus Christ

He wasn’t just a good man trying to be like God, but he was God himself. -- Dorothy Sayers

There he is. In the temple again. Causing trouble. Speaking very different from other preachers. Speaking with authority about sorrow, anxiety, sickness, and death. Penetrating the dark corners of human existence. Shattering illusion. Make no mistake about it; this is a dangerous man. -- Martin Bell

Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or death, or God or of ourselves. -- Blaise Pascal

Joy

Start every day off with a smile and get it over with. --W. C. Fields 

I distrust hard, cold, thin people. -- G. K. Chesterton

Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy." -- G. K. Chesterton

Journey

Not all those who wander are lost. --J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings 

A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step. --Lao-Tsu, The Way of Lao-Tsu

The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready. --Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

The Celtic saints of earlier centuries made much of the idea of peregrinatio, a difficult-to-translate word that suggests an open-ended journey. It was not uncommon for medieval Irish monks to set out with no destination; they left with only the simple impulse to go and seek, guided by the Holy Spirit. Unlike the pilgrimages to shrines common to medieval lore, writes Esther de Waal, "there [was] no specific end or goal such as that of reaching a...holy place that allows the pilgrim at the end of the journey to return home with a sense of mission accomplished." Rather the idea was to learn to live as travelers, pilgrims, "guests of the world," as sixth-century Irishman Saint Columbanus put it. There was to be a creative openness, even if that meant living in a kind of exile so as not to hold too tightly to one's ambitions and spiritual itinerary. The idea was to leave behind the known and safe to find a truer basis for security. This was a largely inner journey. -- Timothy Jones: A Place for God, Page 46-47

Journalists

Something to chatter about! The crowd demands only something to chatter about, and this is understood to mean finding something about each other to chatter about, something about our meaningless lives, particularly the trivialities in our lives. Anything else nauseates the public, which knows only one lust - the desire for self-pollution by talking, a lust in which it indulges with the help of the journalist.  Journalists are animal-keepers who provide something for the public to talk about. In ancient days people were cast to the wild animals. Now the public devours the people - those tastefully prepared by the journalists. -- Excerpted from Provocations by Søren Kierkegaard.

Judgment

People usually don’t get what’s coming to them, unless it is mailed. -- e. e. cummings

Justice

I tremble for my species when I reflect that God is just. -- Thomas Jefferson

Military justice is to justice what military music is to music. -- Groucho Marx

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License, though the work this blog incorporates may be separately licensed.