Top 100 Stephen R. Lawhead Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Alea iacta est. The die has been cast.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

2. “Do not borrow tomorrow’s troubles today.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

3. “Do not think it impossible just because it has never happened. – Friar Tuck.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

4. “Little changes, like small steps all along the way, bring you to a different place. One day you wake up and things are not the same anymore.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

5. “Knowledge is a burden – once taken up, it can never be discarded.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

6. “See here, if a simple act of kindness or generosity, such as buying a loaf of bread for some poor working women, can mean that wholesale death and destruction will be avoided why, a man would be a monster who had it in his power to alleviate all that suffering yet stood by and did nothing.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

7. “Three things cannot be called back: the arrow when it speeds from the bow, the milk when the churn is upturned, the word when it leaps from the tongue.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

8. “Perhaps it is how we are made; perhaps words of truth reach us best through the heart, and stories and songs are the language of the heart.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

9. “Apart from pleasure, beauty also kindles imagination, hope and encouragement. If beauty ceased to exist, we would, in a very real sense, cease to exist – for we would be no longer who we are.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

10. “Life is a school of the spirit.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

11. “Unbelievers enjoy the security of their unbelief; there is great confidence in ignorance.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

12. “For only he who has lived in darkness truly knows and values the light.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

13. “To see evil and call it good, mocks God. Worse, it makes goodness meaningless. A word without meaning is an abomination, for when the word passes beyond understanding the very thing the word stands for passes out of the world and cannot be recalled.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

14. “Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

15. “A ley line is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they’ve been around since the Stone Age.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

16. “We are not required to defeat evil, but only to stand against it. That is enough – the outcome remains with God.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

17. “We are closest to Christ when sharing the world’s misery. Think you Jesus came to remove our pains? Wherever did you get that notion? The Lord came, not to remove our suffering, but to show us the way through it to the glory beyond. We can overcome our travails. That is the promise of the cross.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

18. “They are young and life has no limits. Nothing is impossible, nothing beyond doing or knowing. The world is theirs and everything in it.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

19. “It has ever been thus. The way is hard and narrow, it is true. But it is a path beaten smooth by the countless others who have gone before us. And good news! We do not have to walk it alone. God Himself is with us and has blessed us with friends for the journey.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

20. “We would follow Arthur to the very gates of Hell and beyond if he asked it. And that is the solitary truth.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

21. “The air crackled with the presage of lightning, and a heavy mist descended around them.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

22. “A king is a king, but a bard is the heart and soul of the people; he is their life in song, and the lamp which guides their steps along the paths of destiny. A bard is the essential spirit of the clan; he is the linking ring, the golden cord which unites the manifold ages of the clan, binding all that is past with all that is yet to come.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

23. “There is no arrival without a departure, and all progress is measured by how much has fallen away.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

24. “Great Light, Mover of all that is moving and at rest, be my Journey and my far Destination, be my Want and my Fulfilling, be my Sowing and my Reaping, be my glad Song and my stark Silence. Be my Sword and my strong Shield, be my Lantern and my dark Night, be my everlasting Strength and my piteous Weakness. Be my Greeting and my parting Prayer, be my bright Vision and my Blindness, be my Joy and my sharp Grief, be my sad Death and my sure Resurrection!”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

25. “He holds the sword!′ shouted Merlin. ‘And that has not changed. Whoever would be king must first take the sword from Arthur’s hand. For I tell you truly, none among you will be king without it!”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

26. “The path is revealed in the treading.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

27. “And the Wise Emrys said that Arthur would yet come again to lead his own.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

28. “Arthur!′ I cried, but my voice was lost in the battle roar. The seething waters of the enemy host closed over the place where he had been.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

29. “Fear arises from uncertainty. Where there is perfect certainty, there is no fear.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

30. “I will weep no more for the lost, asleep in their water graves.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

31. “It does not do to hurry the archer, it makes him miss.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

32. “Words are worth little when the heart refuses to hear. Therefore, judge us by our works.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

33. “Arthur stood alone in the centre of the ring of kings. In the flickering light of the Christ Mass candles, holding the sword easily by the hilt, alert, resolute, unafraid, he appeared an avenging angels, eyes alight with the bright fire of righteousness.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

34. “Kings come and go, but sovereignty remains. Kings are men, and men may fall to vice and corruption, but sovereignty is pure and undefiled at its source.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

35. “Death wears many faces, but it’s stench is always the same.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

36. “I tell you the truth, a man may not make himself king; only the blessing of him who holds the kingship can elevate a man to that high place. For sovereignty is a sacred trust that may not be bartered or sold; still less may it be stolen or taken by force.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

37. “Call me Silidons, for such I am.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

38. “Mejor morir en la batalla que vivir como un cobarde.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

39. “May God go with you on your journey, my wayfaring friends. A thousand angels go before you; a thousand prayers for your return. Peace! Good-night.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

40. “Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

41. “Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

42. “If thou wouldst seek justice, thyself must be just.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

43. “To friends! Life belongs to those who love, and where love reigns is man truly king!”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

44. “Stop, Morgian. Your wiles cannot avail you now.’ He turned to the High King and said, ‘The hurt this woman has done me, I readily forgive. It is for the harm that she has caused others that she is to be judged.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

45. “Truth is a constant delight to those that love her; such beauty holds no power to offend.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

46. “In every person there is a soul, In every soul there is intelligence, In every intelligence there is thought, In every thought there is either good or evil, In every evil there is death, In every good there is life, In every life there is God.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

47. “When heaven joins the battle against you, who could stand?”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

48. “We in our present generation stand on the cusp of a new and glorious dawn when mastery of these energies lies fully within our grasp as secret yields to inquiry, which yields to experimentation, which leads to verification and duplication, which, in the final course, leads to knowledge.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

49. “Prayer is our greatest and most salutary weapon in the eternal battle,” put in the man called Schecter, joining them. He took a sip of coffee and continued, “No less than gravity, prayer is one of the elemental forces that moves the world. We underestimate it at our peril.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead

50. “All human beings, by virtue of having been born into this world, are immortal beings – not our material bodies; those are sadly quite fragile, inasmuch as they are bound by the laws of matter and time. The spirit, however, is indestructible. It obeys different laws.”

— Stephen R. Lawhead