Paul Dickson Quotes

“No experiment is ever a complete failure. It can always be used as a bad example.”

“If you place belief on a pedestal, it will become your prison.”

“What the biblical narrative tells me – and, in particular the account of Christ’s passion- is that while I may not be able to trace the artists hand at all times, I can always trust his motives. The God who is in control of all things, who acts behind the scenes in all things, is also the God who willingly suffers. He is the one I can shout at, cry with and find comfort in. His heart, if not all his ways, is clear to me because the cross wore it on his sleeve for all to see. This God is able to sympathise with those who suffer not simply because his is 'all knowing' - an attribute ascribed to any version of divinity - because he has experienced pain first hand.”

“I have taken all my good deeds and all my bad deeds, and cast them … in a heap before the Lord, and fled from both, and betaken myself to the Lord Jesus Christ, and in him I have sweet peace!”

“Man with a crossbow in the proper position at the proper time’s worth a corps of heavy artillery half an hour late and ten miles down the road from where it should be.”

“Incidentally, although the Cistercians did much to improve the quality of sheep, the animal remained much smaller than its modern descendants; as late as the early eighteenth century a sheep wasn't much bulkier than a Labrador Dog.”

“Facing facts is definitely preferable to facing defeat.”

“Why should there be some sort of virtue always attributed to a frank admission of vice?”

“When a man can't sleep, he won't let anybody else sleep either. If he doesn't go off to dreamland the moment his head hits the pillow, he gets frightfully annoyed and won't stay in bed.”

“I never met a gal who represented a mystery to me in quite the fetchin' way you did. It'd be dull and dreary just to find out how a crook got in and out of a locked room to steal a gold-and-jewelled cup. But it's very rummy, and fascinates the old man a bit, to wonder why a crook didn't steal a gold-and-jewelled cup he should have stolen.”