Top 33 Vanauken Quotes: Famous Quotes & Sayings About Vanauken

#1. Sheldon Vanauken wrote that the strongest argument for Christianity is Christians, when they are drawing life from God. The strongest argument against Christianity? Also Christians, when they become exclusive, self-righteous, and complacent.

John Ortberg

#2. God gives us many gifts, but never permanence; that we must seek in his arms.

Sheldon Vanauken

#3. What we did see was that jealousy is fear: it can corrode even if quite baseless.

Sheldon Vanauken

#4. It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.

Dorothy Allison

#5. Love's easy to learn. It's like taking a risk. You set your mind on it and refuse to be afraid, and in no time you feel terrifically exhilarated and all your inhibitions fly out of the window.

Dick Francis

#6. Signs must be read with caution. The history of Christendom is replete with instances of people who misread the signs.

Sheldon Vanauken

#7. Corruption is never compulsory.

Sheldon Vanauken

#8. That death, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy. A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love.

Sheldon Vanauken

#9. But in the books again, great joy through love seemed always to go hand in hand with frightful pain. Still, he thought, looking out across the meadow, still, the joy would be worth the pain - if, indeed, they went together. If

Sheldon Vanauken

#10. If it's half as good as the half we've known, here's Hail! to the rest of the road.

Sheldon Vanauken

#11. A man in the jungle at night, as someone said, may suppose a hyena's growl to be a lion's; but when he hears the lion's growl, he knows damn well it's a lion.

Sheldon Vanauken

#12. A good messenger expects to get shot.

Larry Wall

#13. It is, I think, that we are all so alone in what lies deepest in our souls, so unable to find the words, and perhaps the courage to speak with unlocked hearts, that we don't know at all that it is the same with others.

Sheldon Vanauken

#14. But I was not obeying the first and greatest commandment - to love God first - nor is it clear that I was obeying the second - to love my neighbour. Hating the oppressors of my neighbour isn't perhaps quite what Christ had in mind.

Sheldon Vanauken

#15. I had always served beauty. Davy and I together had loved beauty. Now, maybe, I was worshipping beauty in the Christian God while Davy was worshipping God. There may be danger in the love of beauty, though it seems treason to say it. Perhaps it can be a snare.

Sheldon Vanauken

#16. To believe with certainty, somebody said, one has to begin by doubting.

Sheldon Vanauken

#17. Religiously, we longed for the lively life in Christ, but we did not fully see that we were equally longing for the lively life of the mind - the delights of conversation at once serious and gay, which is, whatever its subject, Christ or poetry or history, the ultimately civilized thing.

Sheldon Vanauken

#18. Similarity is the shadow of difference. Two things are similar by virtue of their difference from another; or different by virtue of one's similarity to a third. So it is with individuals.

Matt Ridley

#19. Both Heaven and Hell are retroactive, all of one's life will eventually be known to have been one or the other.

Sheldon Vanauken

#20. Those sharings just happened to be; but what we must do now is share everything. Everything! If one of us likes anything, there must be something to like in it - and the other one must find it.

Sheldon Vanauken

#21. Her death ... brought me as nothing else could do to know and end my jealousy of God. It saved her faith from assault.

Sheldon Vanauken

#22. When we first fell in love in the dead of winter, we said, "If we aren't more in love in lilactime, we shall be finished." But we were more in love: for love must grow or die.

Sheldon Vanauken

#23. I've often wondered, when they've done Of Mice And Men on stage, and I've seen it, how they did that gun thing. I've watched it on stage, but I don't remember it.

Ray Walston

#24. How strange that we cannot love time. It spoils our loveliest moments. Nothing quite comes up to expectations because of it. We alone: animals, so far as we can see, are unaware of time, untroubled. Time is their natural environment. Why do we sense that it is not ours?

Sheldon Vanauken

#25. It is not possible to be 'incidentally a Christian.' The fact of Christianity must be overwhelmingly first or nothing. This suggests a reason for the dislike of Christians by nominal or non-Christians: their lives contain no overwhelming first but many balances.

Sheldon Vanauken

#26. Goodness & love are as real as their terrible opposites, and, in truth, far more real, though I say this mindful of the enormous evils ... But love is the final reality; and anyone who does not understand this, be he writer or sage, is a man flawed of wisdom.

Sheldon Vanauken

#27. So it was agreed: we would while we were here seek the whole of the Oxford thing, together when we could, apart when we must. And I did, most faithfully, recount all to her, and in the end what was to prove the deepest part of our Oxford days we shared completely. One

Sheldon Vanauken

#28. Between the probable and proved there yawns
A gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd,
Then see behind us sink the ground and, worse,
Our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns
Our only hope: to leap into the Word
That opens up the shuttered universe.

Sheldon Vanauken