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Thomas Howard Quotes

Thomas Howard Quotes

Enjoy the top 9 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Thomas Howard.

“We are doing one of two things when we sing to our children. We are either indulging in a cynical duplicity that is only creating the conditions for disenchantment, or we are passing on to them, as we had passed on to us, something that the human imagination has sanctioned as being in some way perennially valid.”
— Thomas Howard —

“But evil is always illusion. It insists on the lie that we can have something for ourselves. This is the sole principle at work in hell. Lucifer chose to believe it; or, since it is unimaginable that he actually could have believed it, then we may say that he chose to pretend it might be. Very well, says Truth, you may pretend this. But the pretense will be, literally, your undoing. It will unmake you. You will have opted for something that is not, namely, a lie. Hell is built of lies.”

— Thomas Howard

“Everything depends on what is being enacted. Enactment itself, since it is almost synonymous with ceremony, is, as we have seen, part of the very fabric of our human life. We do enact things. We will enact things. No on can stop us from enacting things. The most gaunt anti-ceremonialist may refuse to take off his hat in a shrine, whereupon he has given the whole game away. He agrees with the priests at the shrine that hats on or hats off are significant, and to register his dissociation from their cult, he keeps his on. It is a ceremonial enactment of what he believes. A church wishes to stress the table aspect of the Eucharist, so it instructs its people to remain seated as they eat the bread and drink the cup. This is a ceremonial enactment of something important to them. They agree with the Christians who kneel that posture is immensely significant. The external act matters; stay seated.”

— Thomas Howard

“The general fund of vocabulary, nay, of discourse itself, so calamitous that the failure of the banks in 1929 seems paltry by comparison; so that we find verbal paupers all around us, tattered, emaciated, and reduced to the stark penury of such verbal resources as "It's like wow" or using "interface" or "office" as verbs.”

— Thomas Howard

“My life for yours: it may mean three seconds of my time to redeem some thoughtless bit of self-indulgence on the part of someone else, or it may mean, or did mean, Golgotha, where My Life for Yours was supremely dramatized and entails our eternal joy.”

— Thomas Howard

“The incarnation took all that properly belongs to our humanity and delivered it back to us, redeemed. All of our inclinations and appetites and capacities and yearnings are purified and gathered up and glorified by Christ. He did not come to thin out human life; He came to set it free. All the dancing and feasting and processing and singing and building and sculpting and baking and merrymaking that belong to us, and that were stolen away into the service of false gods, are returned to us in the gospel.”

— Thomas Howard

“Hell is where everyone is doing his own thing. Paradise is where everyone is doing God's thing.”

— Thomas Howard