John 14:6

Ego sum via, et veritas, et vita.

—John 14:6

A Woman of No Importance

We are trying to build up life, Lady Hunstanton, on a better, truer, purer basis than life rests on here. This sounds strange to you all, no doubt. How could it sound other than strange? You rich people in England, you don't know how you are living. How could you know? You shut out from your society the gentle and the good. You laugh at the simple and the pure. Living, as you all do, on others and by them, you sneer at self-sacrifice, and if you throw bread to the poor, it is merely to keep them quiet for a season. With all your pomp and wealth and art you don't know how to live - you don't even know that. You love the beauty that you can see and touch and handle, the beauty that you can destroy, and do destroy, but of the unseen beauty of life, of the unseen beauty of a higher life, you know nothing. You have lost life's secret. Oh, your English society seems to me shallow, selfish, foolish. It has blinded its eyes, and stopped its ears. It lies like a leper in purple. It sits like a dead thing smeared with gold. It is all wrong, all wrong.

—Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance, Act 2, p 449.

John Bunyan

O world of wonders, (I can say no less,)
That I should be preserved in that distress
That I have met with here! O blessed be
That hand that from it hath delivered me!
Dangers in darkness, devils, hell, and sin,
Did compass me, while I this vale was in;
Yea, snares, and pits, and traps, and nets did lie
My path about, that worthless, silly I
Might have been catch'd, entangled, and cast down;
But since I live, let Jesus wear the crown.

–John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress

John Newton

I fear that many have had their prejudices strengthened against our holy religion by such compliances in the manner of customs and amusements, and have thought, that, if there was such joy and comfort to be found in the ways of God as they hear from our pulpits, professors would not, in such numbers, and so often, run amongst them to beg relief from the burden of time hanging upon their hands....I advise you, if you can, to do your business in the world as you do it in the rain.

–John Newton, Letters to a Nobleman

Etienne De Grellet

I expect to pass through this world but once; any good thing therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now; let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

–Etienne De Grellet

D. A. Carson

A text, without a context, is a pretext for a proof text.

–D. A. Carson

Alan D. Sokal

The truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities. These themes can be traced, despite some differences of emphasis, in Aronowitz's analysis of the cultural fabric that produced quantum mechanics; in Ross' discussion of oppositional discourses in post-quantum science; in Irigaray's and Hayles' exegeses of gender encoding in fluid mechanics; and in Harding's comprehensive critique of the gender ideology underlying the natural sciences in general and physics in particular.

–Alan D. Sokal, Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity