Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
In 1880, an Indiana lawyer with no religious training sat down to write a novel and produced the most successful American book of the nineteenth century. Lew Wallace's Ben-Hur spent decades atop the bestseller list, outsold every other novel of its era, and became the first fiction ever blessed by a Pope. Its cultural reach extended far beyond the page: the 1959 film adaptation won a record eleven Academy Awards and introduced millions to the story of Judah Ben-Hur. The novel interweaves the epic tale of a Jewish prince betrayed by a childhood friend and sold into Roman slavery with the quietly unfolding story of a carpenter's son in Galilee. Judah survives the galleys, wins his freedom through chariot racing in the arenas of Rome, and searches for the Messiah whose coming the Magi predicted, a man who might offer the only vengeance powerful enough to satisfy his hunger for justice. What he finds instead challenges everything he believes about power, forgiveness, and what it means to be free. The novel retains its power because Wallace understood something essential: the most profound battles are fought not with swords or chariots, but in the human heart.
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“Riches take wings, comforts vanish, hope withers away,but love stays with us. Love is God.””
— Lew Wallace
“The happiness of love is in action; its test is what one is willing to do for others.””
— Lew Wallace
“The architect had not stopped to bother about columns and porticos, proportions or interiors, or any limitation upon the epic he sought to materialize; he had simply made a servant of Nature - art can go no further.””
— Lew Wallace
“It is more beautiful to trust in God. The beautiful in this world is all from his hand, declaring the perfection of taste; he is the author of all form; he clothes the lily, he colours the rose, he distils the dewdrop, he makes the music of nature; in a word, he organized us for this life, and imposed its conditions; and they are such guaranty to me that, trustful as a little child, I leave to him the organization of my Soul, and every arrangement for the life after death. I know he loves me.””
— Lew Wallace
“Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of a man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.””
— Lew Wallace
“What children we are, even the wisest! When God walks the earth, his steps are often centuries apart.””
— Lew Wallace
“Men speak of dreaming as if it were a phenomenon of night and sleep. They should know better. All results achieved by us are self-promised, and all self-promises are made in dreams awake. Dreaming is the relief of labor,the wine that sustains us in act. We learn to love labor, not for itself, but for the opportunity it furnishes for dreaming, which is the great under-monotone of real life, unheard, unnoticed, because of its constancy. Living is dreaming. Only in the graves are there no dreams.””
— Lew Wallace
“To begin a reform, go not into the places of the great and rich; go rather to those whose cups of happiness are empty--to the poor and humble.””
— Lew Wallace
“Knowledge leaves no room for chances.””
— Lew Wallace
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Wallace, Lew. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Lex, lex-books.com/book/ben-hur-a-tale-of-the-christ-09546847-624c-4298-8880-9358783a53ab.Wallace, L. (n.d.). Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/ben-hur-a-tale-of-the-christ-09546847-624c-4298-8880-9358783a53abWallace, Lew. Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/ben-hur-a-tale-of-the-christ-09546847-624c-4298-8880-9358783a53ab.
