A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
C. S. LewisRead
The longest way round is the shortest way home. (Quoting Alexander MacLaren, The Wearied Christ and Other Sermons)
Interpretation
Taking a longer path can sometimes lead to quicker and more effective results.
This quote suggests that the most straightforward route isn't always the most effective. Sometimes, choosing a more complex path or facing challenges can lead to deeper understanding and genuine progress, ultimately guiding us home to our true purpose or destination more efficiently than a direct approach would.
In practice
During a motivational speech about life choices.
A dogmatic belief in objective value is necessary to the very idea of a rule which is not tyranny or an obedience which is not slavery.
I enjoyed my breakfast this morning, and I think that was a good thing and do not think it was condemned by God. But I do not think myself a good man for enjoying it.
Aim at heaven and you will get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you get neither.
Forgiving and being forgiven are two names for the same thing. The important thing is that a discord has been resolved.
I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. It doesn't change God - it changes me.
The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred
I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.
We turn skeletons into goddesses and look to them as if they might teach us how not to need.
Forgotten were the elementary rules of logic, that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and that what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.
For from the error of not knowing, or understanding, what sin is, there necessarily arises another error, that people cannot know or understand what grace is.
Words are things, but things which mean. We cannot do away with meaning without doing away with signs, that is, with language itself. Moreover, we would have to do away with the universe. All the things man touches are impregnated with meaning.
Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.
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