Nathan David Wilson (born 1978) is an American author of young adult fiction.
Descartes, the Frenchman, had little trouble knowing that he existed.
If God gives you (or makes you) a joke, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Laugh. ) If God gives you an obstacle, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Climb it. Then laugh. ) If God gives you more profound hardship, what are you meant to do in response? (Receive it. Climb it. Then laugh. Exhibit A: His Son. )
Plato, the first true pope of philosophy (sorry, Socrates), argued for a World of Forms above the reality-a transcendent plane of perfect essences, pure and lovely, where nothing ever gets muddy (including the essence of mud. )
The truth is that a life well lived is always lived on a rising scale of difficulty.
Self-loathing and self-worship can easily be the same thing. You hate the small sack of fluids and resentments that you are, and you would go to any length, and betray anything and anyone, to preserve it.
Glory is sacrifice, glory is exhaustion, glory is having nothing left to give.
Do not resent your place in the story. Do not imagine yourself elsewhere. Do not close your eyes and picture a world without thorns, without shadows, without hawks. Change this world. Use your body like a tool meant to be used up, discarded, and replaced. Better every life you touch. We will reach the final chapter. When we have eyes that can stare into the sun, eyes that only squint for the Shenikah, then we will see laughing children pulling cobras by their tails, and hawks and rabbits playing tag.
Sometimes standing against evil is more important than defeating it.
Henry York, aka Whimpering Child, aka WC (hair sample included), is hereby identified as Enemy, Hazard, and Human Mishap to all faeren in all districts, in all ways, and in all worlds.
Caves and darkness can't hold you when you die, they can only hold your bones.
Marx called religion an opiate, and all too often it is. But philosophy is an anaesthetic, a shot to keep the wonder away.
Lay your life down. Your heartbeats cannot be hoarded. Your reservoir of breaths is draining away. You have hands, blister them while you can. You have bones, make them strain - they can carry nothing in the grave. You have lungs, let them spill with laughter.
Do not fear the shadowy places. You will never be the first one there. Another went ahead and down until He came out the other side.
God's big enough that small doesn't matter.
In this story, the sun moves. In this story, every night meets a dawn and burns away in the bright morning. In this story, Winter can never hold back the Spring. . . He is the best of all possible audiences, the only Audience to see every scene, the Author who became a Character and heaped every shadow on Himself. The Greeks were right. Live in fear of a grinding end and a dank hereafter. Unless you know a bigger God, or better yet, are related to Him by blood.
Your father died for me, and dying with you would be an honor, though not as great as dying to save you.
To love is to be selfless. To be selfless is to be fearless. To be fearless is to strip your enemies of their greatest weapon. Even if they break our bodies and drain our blood, we are unvanquished. Our goal was never to live; our goal is to love. It is the goal of all truly noble men and women. Give all that can be given. Give even your life itself.
Stealing ideas from contemporaries is rude and tasteless. Stealing from the long dead is considered literary and admirable. The same is true of grave-robbing. Loot your local cemetery and find yourself mired in social awkwardness. But unearth the tomb of an ancient king and you can feel free to pop off his toe rings. You'll probably end up on a book tour, or bagging an honorary degree or two.
Spring is worth the wait. Life is worth the death.
We are narrative creatures, and we need narrative nourishment-nar rative catechisms.