Definitive Quotations

I realize that I did not necessarily choose the most definitive quotation when I wrote my last entry - I chose instead what spoke to me. But when I tried to find the definitive quotation I couldn't quite narrow it down.

So here is a not-quite random selection:

p. 78 ... the recent Christian pursuit of relevance has all too often led to transience... Many years ago, Dean Inge of St. Paul's Cathedral in London remarked, in words that could be the epitaph for many trendy church leaders, "He who marries the spirit of the age soon becomes a widower."

p. 79 As the French writer Charles Peguy wrote a century ago, "It will never be known what acts of cowardice have been motivated by the fear of not looking sufficiently progressive."

p. 104 Or as Winston Churchill wrote simply in words that go a long way to explain his farsightedness as an unheeded messenger, "The further back you can look, the further forward you can see."

p. 106 The fact is that nothing is finally relevant except in relation to the true and the eternal. Unless something is true, its perspective will at some point be wrong and its practical value in the end will be nil. Only truth and eternity give relevance to "relevance."

p. 112 For Weil was right: It takes the eternal to guarantee the relevant; only the repeated touch of the timeless will keep us truly timely.