Maxims*

*Not found in the Bible, but helpful to achieving the biblical goal of leading a wise and righteous life. They are listed with the oldest sources first.

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

– John Adams (1735-1826)

“Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify, simplify! I say, let your affairs be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb nail.”

– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

– Lord Acton aka John Dalberg (1834-1902)

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”

– Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919)

“If Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for Him.”

***

“Only one life, ’twill soon be past,
Only what’s done for Christ will last.”

C. T. Studd (1860-1931)

“For the simplicity that lies this side of complexity, I would not give a fig, but for the simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity, I would give my life.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (1841–1935)

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”

– G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”

– Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

“To know Him and to make Him known”

Robert C. McQuilkin (1886-1952), and perhaps others before him

“The modern world imagines that it has outgrown religion. It has done nothing of the kind. It has merely forgotten it. And because it has forgotten it, it no longer understands itself.

Men do not realize that the whole framework of their moral judgments, their political habits, and even their intellectual methods were formed within a Christian society and cannot exist long outside it. When that framework breaks, they will not find themselves enlightened, but bewildered; not free, but enslaved; not rational, but confused.”

– Hilaire Belloc (1870-1953)

“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem—neat, plausible, and wrong.”

– H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: “I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.” That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963); for similar formulations, see Predecessor Trilemmas to the C. S. Lewis Trilemma

“I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

– C. S. Lewis (1898-1963)