Farrar Quotes & Sayings

Great editors do not discover nor produce great authors; great authors create and produce great publishers. — John Farrar

The shock of unemployment becomes a pathology in its own right. — Robert Farrar Capon

If miracles be incredible, Christianity is false. If Christ wrought no miracles, then the Gospels are untrustworthy. — Frederic Farrar

The feet-on-the-stove stance of this book is a deliberate attempt to cure myself, and anyone else who will listen, of the nasty habit of worrying the world to pieces like a terrier with a rag. What we are up to here is not the hasty shaking loose of a culinary result, but a patient rumination on cooking itself. There are more important things to do than hurry. — Robert Farrar Capon

The proper self-knowledge and self-love of every created thing is ipso facto a participation in the knowledge and love of God. The entire universe moves by desire for the Highest Good simply because every part of it loves what God loves - namely, its own being. — Robert Farrar Capon

Grace doesn't sell; you can hardly even give it away, because it works only for losers and no one wants to stand in their line. — Robert Farrar Capon

Without seasons the human body seems to disagree with how it perceives the world, feels as if what's missing is the feeling & wants to attach to anything that will return to itself. — Ross Farrar

Although a friend may remain faithful in misfortune, yet none but the very best and loftiest will remain faithful to us after our errors and our sins. — Frederic Farrar

Autumn is the best time of year. Maybe the worst for being a single girl of twenty-six, but in every other way, it's perfect. The best things come out of hiding this time of year: the rich colors of fall leaves, pumpkin flavored everything, dark lipstick, sweaters and boots, fires, and . . . Landon Farrar, apparently. — Holly Hall

If we would see the color of our future, we must look for it in our present; if we would gaze on the star of our destiny, we must look for it in our hearts. — Frederic Farrar

The new heavens and the new earth are not replacements for the old ones; they are transfigurations of them. The redeemed order is not the created order forsaken; it is the created order - all of it - raised and glorified. — Robert Farrar Capon

Everybody, even the worst stinker on earth, is somebody for whom Christ died. — Robert Farrar Capon

I myself, however, could never resist the temptation to read raisin paste for wine in the story of the Miracle of Cana. When the ruler of the feast had tasted the water that was made raisin paste ... he said unto the bridegroom, 'Every man doth at the beginning doth set forth good raisin paste, and when men have well drunk [eaten? the text is no doubt corrupt], then that which is worse, but thou hast kept the good raisin paste until now. — Robert Farrar Capon

O Lord, refresh our sensibilities. Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in, and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with, and casseroles that put starch and substance in our limp modernity. Take away our fear of fat and make us glad of the oil which ran upon Aaron's beard. Give us pasta with a hundred fillings, and rice in a thousand variations. Above all, give us grace to live as true men - to fast till we come to a refreshed sense of what we have and then to dine gratefully on all that comes to hand. Drive far from us, O Most Bountiful, all creatures of air and darkness; cast out the demons that possess us; deliver us from the fear of calories and the bondage of nutrition; and set us free once more in our own land, where we shall serve Thee as Thou hast blessed us - with the dew of heaven, the fatness of the earth, and plenty of corn and wine. Amen. — Robert Farrar Capon

Whether the prayer of Seneca was granted we do not know; but, as we do not again hear of Marcus, it is probable that he died before his father, and that the line of Seneca, like that of so many great men, became extinct in the second generation. — Frederic William Farrar

Christianity is NOT a religion; it is the proclamation of the end of religion. Religion is a human activity dedicated to the job of reconciling God to humanity and humanity to itself. The Gospel, however - the Good News of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, is the astonishing announcement that God has done the whole work of reconciliation without a scrap of human assistance. It is the bizarre proclamation that religion is over - period. — Robert Farrar Capon

Queen Lily Ruckler, negotiations have ceased with the Commoner leaders of the world. The time for attempting peace is over. There is no other viable option. Mystical-Commoner World War II has been officially declared. Strike now. My heartfelt regrets, Elder Richard Harcourt." I lowered the missive while Bonnie jumped onto the table, sitting regally but watching everyone warily in front of where I stood, and I stated, "We're officially at war. I want to strike Sydney's defenses within the hour, before they realize what's happening." My dead gaze landed on Antonio. I blinked, and then moved on to every gentleman and lady in the room, letting my power touch each of them so that no one would dare argue with me. "I will lead the attack alongside Elder Farrar."
I did.
I relished it, my rage finally finding a useful outlet.
Surprise, surprise, I fucking finally found something I excelled at.
Bloodshed. — Scarlett Dawn

It's the quiet life of obedience that will earn a hearing — Steve Farrar

Your kids don't need more things. They need you. And they want you. The more time that you can spend with them, the more they are going to want to be like you and know the Heavenly Father who made you such a great dad. That's how you lead your kids to Christ. — Steve Farrar

Man was made to lead with his chin; he is worth knowing only with his guard down, his head up and his heart rampant on his sleeve. — Robert Farrar Capon

When we are broken because of increased hardship, we simply have to trust in the goodness of God. — Steve Farrar

For all its rooted loveliness, the world has no continuing city here; it is an outlandish place, a foreign home, a session in via to a better version of itself-and it is our glory to see it so and to thirst until Jerusalem comes home at last. We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great. — Robert Farrar Capon

Even to this day, grace remains hard to swallow. Religiosity and moralism go down easier than free forgiveness. — Robert Farrar Capon

It appears to be uncertain whether the journey of Mary with her husband was obligatory or voluntary ... Women were liable to a capitation tax, if this enrolment also involved taxation. But, apart from any legal necessity, it may easily be imagined that at such a moment Mary would desire not to be left alone. The cruel suspicion of which she had been the subject, and which had almost led to the breaking off of her betrothal (Matt. 1: 19) would make her cling all the more to the protection of her husband. — Frederic Farrar

Error increases with distance. It's true with bowling, and it's true with families. — Steve Farrar

It is easy to be a slave to the letter, and difficult to enter into the spirit; easy to obey a number of outward rules, difficult to enter intelligently and self-sacrificingly into the will of God. — Frederic Farrar

O the sad frugality of the middle-income mind. O the humorless neatness of an intellectuality which buys mass-produced candlesticks and carefully puts one at each end of every philosophical mantlepiece! How far it lies from the playfulness of Him who composed such odd and needless variations on the themes of leaf and backbone, eye and nose! A thousand praises that it has only lately managed to lay its cold hand on the wines, the sauces, and the cheeses of the world! A hymn of thanksgiving that it could not reach into the depths of the sea to clamp its grim simplicities over the creatures that swim luminously in the dark! A shout of rejoicing for the fish who wears his eyeballs at the ends of long stalks, and for the jubilant laughter of the God who holds him in life with a daily bravo at the bravura of his being! — Robert Farrar Capon

At the root of many a woman's failure to become a great cook lies her failure to develop a workmanlike regard for knives. — Robert Farrar Capon

Heaven is populated entirely by forgiven sinners — Robert Farrar Capon

Rather, the kingdom already exists in the King himself, and when he ascends, the whole world goes with him (John 12:32).
It is not that someday Jesus will do this, that, and the other thing, and then the Kingdom will come. It is not, for example, that at some future date the dead will rise or that in some distant consummation we will reign with him. Rather, it is that we have already been buried with him in baptism, and that we are already risen with him through faith in the operation of God who raised him from the dead, and that we are now - in this and every moment - enthroned together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.
But — Robert Farrar Capon

The first thing an unpublished author should remember is that no one asked him to write in the first place. With this firmly in mind, he has no right to become discouraged just because other people are being published. — John Farrar

If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter. — Robert Farrar Capon

Jesus obviously does not answer many questions from you or me. Which is why apologetics is always such a questionable enterprise. Jesus just doesn't argue. — Robert Farrar Capon

And the sad fact is that the church, both now and at far too many times in its history, has found it easier to act as if it were selling the sugar of moral and spiritual achievement rather than the salt ofJesus' passion and death. — Robert Farrar Capon

He comes to us in the brokenness of our health, in the shipwreck of our family lives, in the loss of all possible peace of mind, even in the very thick of our sins. He saves us in our disasters, not from them. He emphatically does not promise to meet only the odd winner of the self-improvement lottery. He meets us all in our endless and inescapable losing. — Robert Farrar Capon

Grace perennially waits for us to accept our destruction and, in that acceptance, to discover the power of the Resurrection and the Life. — Robert Farrar Capon

Man's liberty ends, and it ought to end, when that liberty becomes the curse of its neighbors. — Frederic William Farrar

Grace cannot prevail ... until our lifelong certainty that someone is keeping score has run out of steam and collapsed. — Robert Farrar Capon

There, then, is the role of the amateur: to look the world back to grace. There, too, is the necessity of his work: His tribe must be in short supply; his job has gone begging. The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of a pack of trolls. Indeed, the whole distinction between art and trash, between food and garbage, depends on the presence or absence of the loving eye. Turn a statue over to a boor, and his boredom will break it to bits - witness the ruined monuments of antiquity. On the other hand, turn a shack over to a lover; for all its poverty, its lights and shadows warm a little and its numbed surfaces prickle with feeling. — Robert Farrar Capon

There is only one real failure in life that is possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows. — Frederic William Farrar

I am not a politician, and my other habits air good. — Charles Farrar Browne

Economy is not one of the necessary principles of the universe; it is one of the jokes which God indulges in precisely because he can afford it. If a man takes it seriously, however, he is doomed forever to a middle-income appreciation of the world. Indeed, only the very poor and the very rich are safe from its idolatry. The poor, because while they must take it seriously, they cannot possibly believe in it as a good, and the rich, because, though they may see it as a good, they cannot possibly take it seriously. For the one it is a bad joke, for the other a good one; but for both it is only part of the divine ludicrousness of creation - of the sensus lusus which lies at the heart of the matter. And that is why all men should hasten to become very poor or very rich - or both at once, like St. Paul, who had nothing and yet possessed all things. The world was made in sport, for sports; economy is worth only a smile. There are more serious things to laugh at. — Robert Farrar Capon

People converted by fear-mongering are people converted from evil, not to the truth. — Robert Farrar Capon

Does it not whet your appetite for the critical opera omnia of such an author, where he will freely have at the lenth and breath of Scripture? Can you not see his promised land flowing with peanut butter and jelly; his apocalypse, in which the great whore of Babylon is given the cup of ginger ale of the fierceness of the wrath of God? — Robert Farrar Capon

It is precisely because no one needs soup, fish, meat, salad, cheese, and dessert at one meal that we so badly need to sit down to them from time to time. It was largesse that made us all; we were not created to fast forever ... Enter here, therefore, as a sovereign remedy for the narrowness of our minds and the stinginess of our souls. — Robert Farrar Capon

I do think it imperative that you recover from fear of rejection. Forgive me, but that is the sin of pride, and you must avoid that particular manifestation of the sin if you are to reach the goal ... you hope for. — John Farrar

A man may be an heretic in the truth, and if he believe things only because his pastor says so, or the assembly so determines, without knowing other reason, though his belief be true, yet the very truth he holds becomes his heresy. — Frederic Farrar

The truth that makes us free is always ticking away like a time-bomb in the basement of everybody's church. — Robert Farrar Capon

How should we provide for our families? Financially, spatially (be near them), emotionally, morally, spiritually. ... I don't have what it takes to provide for my family spiritually; I need Jesus. — Steve Farrar

IMITATION CITRUS FLAVORED DIETARY ARTIFICIALLY SWEETENED CARBONATED BEVERAGE. That, I submit, is not a label; it is an incantation. Someday, it should be set to a suitable plainsong tune or Anglican chant. — Robert Farrar Capon

The following sentiments are illustrative of the philosophy of the Talmud: "Love peace and pursue it at any cost." — Frederic Farrar

We are so impressed by scientific clank that we feel we ought not to say that the sunflower turns because it knows where the sun is. It is almost second nature to us to prefer explanations ... with a large vocabulary. We are much more comfortable when we are assured that the sunflower turns because it is heliotropic. The trouble with that kind of talk is that it tempts us to think that we know what the sunflower is up to. But we don't. The sunflower is a mystery, just as every single thing in the universe is. — Robert Farrar Capon

If the church preaches faith in anything other than the resurrection - if it gives so much as the impression that anything else, be it political action, moral achievement, or spiritual proficiency, can save the world - it becomes just one more false, parochial prophet leading the world away from the catholic parousia of Christ in the universal death of history. — Robert Farrar Capon

Someone's running your life. Most of us are on the throne of our own lives. Jesus wants to sit on the throne of your life. — Steve Farrar

The bread and the pastry, the cheeses and wine, and the sugar go into the Supper of the lamb because we do. It is our love that brings the city home. It is I grant you, an incautious and extravagant hope. But only outlandish hopes can make themselves at home. — Robert Farrar Capon

I'm not a Christian because I need a crutch. Hey, I need a stretcher! — Steve Farrar

Judgment, as it is portrayed in the parables of Jesus (not to mention the rest of the New Testament) never comes until after acceptance: grace remains forever the sovereign consideration. The difference between the blessed and the cursed is one thing and one thing only: the blessed accept their acceptance and the cursed reject it; but the acceptance is already in place for both groups before either does anything about it. — Robert Farrar Capon

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world — Robert Farrar Capon

We were given appetites, not to consume the world and forget it, but to taste its goodness and hunger to make it great.
That is the unconsolable heartburn, the lifelong disquietude of having been made in the image of God. — Robert Farrar Capon

I have already given two cousins to the war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother. — Charles Farrar Browne

Little self-denials, little honesties, little passing words of sympathy, little nameless acts of kindness, little silent victories over favorite temptations-these are the silent threads of gold which, when woven together, gleam out so brightly in the pattern of life that God approves. — Frederic Farrar

Every dish in the ferial cuisine, however, provides a double or treble delight: Not only is the body nourished and the palate pleased, the mind is intrigued by the triumph of ingenuity over scarcity - by the making of slight materials into a considerable matter. A man can do worse than to be poor. He can miss altogether the sight of the greatness of small things. — Robert Farrar Capon

Grace is the celebration of life, relentlessly hounding all the non-celebrants in the world. It is a floating, cosmic bash shouting its way through the streets of the universe, flinging the sweetness of its cassations to every window, pounding at every door in a hilarity beyond all liking and happening, until the prodigals come out at last and dance, and the elder brothers finally take their fingers out of their ears. — Robert Farrar Capon

Let us all be happy, and live within our means, even if we have to borrow the money to do it with. — Charles Farrar Browne

Food is the daily sacrament of unnecessary goodness, ordained for a continual remembrance that the world will always be more delicious than useful. — Robert Farrar Capon

There is only one unpardonable sin, and that is to withhold pardon from others. — Robert Farrar Capon

No true work since the world began was ever wasted; no true life since the world began has ever failed. Oh, understand those two perverted word, failure and success and measure them by the eternal, not the earthly, standard. When after thirty obscure, toilsome, unrecorded years in the shop of the village carpenter, one came forth to be pre-eminently the man of sorrows, to wander from city to city in homeless labors, and to expire in lonely agony upon the shameful cross
was that a failure. — Frederic Farrar

Religion, therefore - despite the correctness of its insistence that something needs to be done about our relationship with God - remains unqualified bad news: it traps us in a game we will always and everywhere lose. — Robert Farrar Capon

They drink with impunity, or anybody who invites them. — Charles Farrar Browne

For although Claudius had been accused of gambling and drunkenness, not only were no worse sins laid to his charge, but he had successfully established some claim to being considered a learned man. — Frederic William Farrar

I like a cook who smiles out loud when he tastes his own work.
Let God worry about your modesty; I want to see your enthusiasm. — Robert Farrar Capon

A lost sheep is, for all practical purposes a dead sheep. It is the admission that we are dead in our sins
that we have no power of ourselves either to save ourselves or to convince anyone else that we are worth saving. It is the recognition that our whole life is out of our hands and that if we ever live again, our life will be entirely the gift of some gracious shepherd. God finds us the desert of death (not in the garden of improvement) and in the power of Jesus' resurrection, he puts us on his shoulders rejoicing and brings us home. — Robert Farrar Capon

The world looks as if it has been left in the custody of trolls. — Robert Farrar Capon

Christianity is not a religion. Christianity is the proclamation of the end of religion, not of a new religion, or even of the best of all religions. If the cross is the sign of anything, it's the sign that God has gone out of the religion business and solved all of the world's problems without requiring a single human being to do a single religious thing. What the cross is actually a sign of is the fact that religion can't do a thing about the world's problems - that it never did work and it never will — Robert Farrar Capon

Lord, please restore to us the comfort of merit and demerit. Show us that there is at least something we can do. Tell us that at the end of the day there will at least be one redeeming card of our very own. Lord, if it is not too much to ask, send us to bed with a few shreds of self-respect upon which we can congratulate ourselves. But whatever you do, do not preach grace. Give us something to do, anything; but spare us the indignity of this indiscriminate acceptance. — Robert Farrar Capon

God does not punish people for being nonpacifists; war alone is punishment enough. — Robert Farrar Capon

It was John Flavel who said to his congregation in England, some three hundred years ago, "Some providences of God, like Hebrew letters, are best understood backwards. — Steve Farrar

The only reason that judgment comes into it at all is the sad fact that there will always be dummies who refuse to trust a good thing when it's handed to them on a platter. — Robert Farrar Capon

It turns out that what makes history come out in triumph is some dumb sheep that couldn't find its way home. — Robert Farrar Capon

To be sure, food keeps us alive, but that is only its smallest and most temporary work. Its eternal purpose is to furnish our sensibilities against the day when we shall sit down at the heavenly banquet and see how gracious the Lord is. Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste. — Robert Farrar Capon

Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works. — Robert Farrar Capon

However much we hate the law, we are more afraid of grace — Robert Farrar Capon

prepackaged slices or the Supermarket swiss (which has the texture but no where near the flavor, of rubber gloves) — Robert Farrar Capon

Be Sure To Notice When You're Happy — Brenda Farrar-ejemai

We are saved gratis, by grace. We do nothing and we deserve nothing; it is all, absolutely and without qualification, one huge, hilarious gift. — Robert Farrar Capon

There is therefore now no condemnation for two reasons: you are dead now; and God, as the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world, has been dead all along. The blame game was over before it started. It really was. All Jesus did was announce that truth and tell you it would make you free. It was admittedly a dangerous thing to do. You are a menace. Be he did it; and therefore, menace or not, here you stand: uncondemned, forever, now. What are you going to do with your freedom? — Robert Farrar Capon

Every real thing is a joy, if only you have eyes and ears to relish it, a nose and tongue to taste it. — Robert Farrar Capon

When God's children pass under the shadow of the cross of Calvary, they know that through that shadow lies their passage to the great white throne. For them Gethsemane is as paradise. God fills it with sacred presences; its solemn silence is broken by the music of tender promises, its awful darkness softened and brightened by the sunlight of Heavenly faces and the music of angel wings. — Frederic Farrar

...as long as her grace remains grace, she remains the only life he has - even while he is whoring around in some Babylonian dive. Whether he behaves or misbehaves, he is dead from start to finish but for her. Unchanging, unswerving, she goes on being his resurrection, the one center at which his sins are always forgiven. All he has to do the seventh time, or the seventy-times-seventh time, is the same thing he did the first time: confess, admit once more the truth of his abiding death, and trust once again the life that never left him for a second. — Robert Farrar Capon

But in the life of every man there are influences of a far more real and penetrating character than those which come through the medium of schools or teachers. — Frederic William Farrar

Give us this day our daily taste. Restore to us soups that spoons will not sink in and sauces which are never the same twice. Raise up among us stews with more gravy than we have bread to blot it with Give us pasta with a hundred fillings. — Robert Farrar Capon

The Gospel of grace must not be turned into a bait-and-switch offer. It is not one of those airline supersavers in which you read of a $59.00 fare to Orlando only to find, when you try to buy a ticket, that the six seats per flight at that price are all taken and that the trip will now cost you $199.95. Jesus must not be read as having baited us with grace only to clobber us in the end with law. For as the death and resurrection of Jesus were accomplished once and for all, so the grace that reigns by those mysteries reigns eternally - even in the thick of judgment. — Robert Farrar Capon

It's just misery to try to keep count of what God is no longer counting. — Robert Farrar Capon

Only when you are finally able, with the publican, to admit that you are dead will you be able to stop balking at grace. — Robert Farrar Capon

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people's satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings. — Robert Farrar Capon

Salvation is not a matter of getting a reward that will make up for a rotten deal; it is a matter of entering by faith into the happiness - the hilarity beyond all liking and happening - that has been pounding on our door all along. — Robert Farrar Capon

There was living in the palace at this time a brother of the great Germanicus, and consequently an uncle of the late emperor, whose name was Claudius Caesar. — Frederic William Farrar

The divine knowing - what the Father knows, and what the Word says in response to that knowing, and what the Spirit broods upon under the speaking of the Word - all that eternal intellectual activity isn't just daydreaming. It's the cause of everything that is. God doesn't find out about creation; he knows it into being. His knowing has hair on it. It is an effective act. What he knows, is. What he thinks, by the very fact of his thinking, jumps from no-thing into thing. He never thought of anything that wasn't. — Robert Farrar Capon

However grand our sacramental downsittings and updressings may be, they remain only and precisely sacraments: real presences, under particular signs, of the happier order that faith can discover under any and all signs. They're a bit like the church. As long as we see them as an earnest of the kingdom, they're all right; when we put on airs and act as if they were the kingdom itself, they look just silly. — Robert Farrar Capon

All salt and no finesse makes Jack a dull cook. — Robert Farrar Capon