There is a misconception that John Calvin is someone worthy of emulation.

By our uncritical pursuit of relevance we have actually courted irrelevance; by
our breathless chase after relevance without a matching commitment to
faithfulness, we have become not only unfaithful but irrelevant; by our
determined efforts to redefine ourselves in ways that are more compelling to the
modern world than are faithful to Christ, we have lost not only our identity but
our authority and our relevance. Our crying need is to be faithful as well as relevant.

~ Os Guinness

(gleaned from RZIM's Slice of Infinity, "The Most Progressive")

The power of the world, the spirit of its literature, the temptations of business and pleasure, all unite to make up a religion in which it is sought to combine a comfortable hope for the future with the least possible amount of sacrifice in the present.

~ Andrew Murray

There is nothing so ridiculous but some philosopher has said it.

Cicero, De Divinatione.

Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions.

~ G. K. Chesterton

For nineteen and a half centuries, the Christian churches have labored, not without success, to remove this unfortunate impression made by their Lord and Master. They have hustled the Magdalens from the communion table, founded total abstinence societies in the name of him who made the water wine, and added improvements of their own, such as various bans and anathemas upon dancing and theatergoing....Feeling that the original commandment ‘thou shalt not work’ was rather half hearted, [they] have added to it a new commandment, ‘thou shalt not play.

~Dorothy L. Sayers

(gleaned from RZIM's Slice of Infinity, "Bad Reputations")

There once was in man a true happiness, of which all that
now remains is the empty print and trace. This he tries
in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in
things that are not there the help he cannot find in those
that are, though none can help, because the infinite abyss
can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object;
in other words, by God himself. He only is our true good,
and since we have forsaken him, it is a strange thing that
there is nothing in nature which has not been serviceable
in taking His place; the stars, the heavens, earth, the
elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves,
serpents, fever, pestilence, war, famine, vices, adultery,
incest. And since man has lost the true good, everything
can appear equally good to him, even his own
destruction, though so opposed to God, to reason,
and to the whole course of nature.

~Blaise Pascal