“When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.”
John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“The Christian’s life should always be controlled and dominated by the Lord Jesus Christ, and by considerations of what will be well-pleasing in His sight.” Martyn Lloyd Jones
if you know anyone who speaks Pashto....send them this!
Sometimes, you need to take a walk outside and read the Bible. 
“we are simply part of the generation who came after the last one and before the next..” David Gibson
“If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions.” Peter Kreeft
What does man gain by all the toil
at which he toils under the sun? (Ecclesiastes 1:3)
Answer: nothing.
“Not long ago I was building sand castles on the beach with my daughter. With some success we built a large castle, dug a moat around it, and surrounded it with smaller castles and turrets decorated with shells. She was proud of her work, and we enjoyed being absorbed in our task. But eventually—and to her great surprise—we had to retreat as the tide encroached and the waves engulfed our handiwork. The foaming water returned our project to a knobbly patch of ordinary beach. How long do sand castles last?” David Gibson
Life is short.
“Behold, you have made my days a few handbreadths. . . Surely all mankind stands as a mere breath!”
(Psalm 39:5)
“The ultimate mystery of personality—of personhood—is that no person exists for his or her own sake. As a matter of fact, it is precisely my own welfare that is the last thing in the world I am to be concerned with. Priests are to spend their days offering for others: the Good Shepherd gives his life for the sheep. The beholding, the loving—the adoration, if you will—of my own being is somebody else’s business, not mine.” Robert Capon
“Why is there so much trouble and difficulty in maintaining peace in the world? Think of all the endless international conferences that have been held in this present century to try to produce peace. Why have they all failed and why are we now coming to the state when very few of us seem to have any confidence in any conference that men may choose to hold? What is the explanation of all this? Why did the League of Nations fail? Why does the United Nations Organization seem to be failing? What is the matter? Now I suggest to you that there is only one adequate answer to that question; it is not political, it is not economic, it is not social. The answer once more is essentially and primarily theological and doctrinal.”
Martyn Lloyd Jones c. 1959.
Robert farrar capon on dieting:
“Dieting is wrong because it is not priestly. It is a way of using food without using it, of bringing it into your history without letting it get involved with your history. It is nonhistorical eating. And it is pure fraud. Bring it down to cases. Take an uncle with an embarrassingly low metabolic rate: if he gets more than 1,800 calories a day, his weight goes up out of control. He puts himself in the hands of dietary experts. They oblige him with a program. It works. At 900 calories per diem he becomes an up-to-date, low-budget uncle. But, if you see him in a year, he will have put it all back on again. And why? Because no sane human being can stand living on 1,800 calories every day till the clap of doom. So he nibbles away for a while, and then in desperation surrenders himself to creamed lobster, mashed potatoes, and a proper string of double scotches. He is lost, and he knows it. He just gives up.
The only thing that can save him is historical eating—eating worthy of the priesthood of Adam—eating that alternates as it should between feast and fast. The dieter is a condemned man. Every feast is, ipso facto, a sin. He apologizes for eating my pâté; he abjectly acknowledges his guilt over my wife’s Cake à la Bennich. Good is evil to him, and bounty a burden. But if he would fast! If he would take no food on Wednesday—and none on Tuesday too, if he wills to reign like a king—what prodigies might he not perform at Thursday’s dinner; how, like a giant, go running from course to course?”
“Adam has got to be somebody’s grandfather—and Eve, somebody’s grandmother—or history is nonsense. The human race is precisely a web: times without number, good science has done nothing but confirm that. If I got my flat-footed walk or my love of caviare from my own grandfather, the case is closed. History is by that fact real; and all real things have beginnings. My grandfather himself had a grandfather. And if you rummage around long enough, somewhere in the web you are going to run into a fellow who had no human grandfather at all and who, therefore, is the real granddaddy of history. That gentleman is Adam.”
“You’ve never seen a Harley Davidson motorcycle in the parking lot of a psychiatrist’s office”