491 shaares
"The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature."
"The only clear line I draw these days is this: when my religion tries to come between me and my neighbor, I will choose my neighbor... Jesus never commanded me to love my religion."
"Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful."
"The universe is not rich enough to buy the vote of an honest man."
"I must write down that I am to be an artist. Not in the sense of aesthetic frippery, but in the sense of aesthetic craftsmanship; otherwise I will feel my loneliness continually--like this today. The word craftsmanship takes care of the work angle & the word aesthetic the truth angle. Angle. It will be a life struggle with no consummation. When something is finished, it cannot be possessed. Nothing can be possessed but the struggle. All our lives are consumed in possessing the struggle but only when the struggle is cherished & directed to a final consummation outside this life is it of any value. I want to be the best artist it is possible for me to be, under God."
"God cannot be known; God can only be loved. And that loving becomes its own way of knowing."
"There is a taint on any contact between two people which does not affirm as an axiom the personal inviolability of both."
"Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive."
"The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy."
"A free public library is a revolutionary notion, and when people don’t have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries. You cut people off from essential sources of information — mythical, practical, linguistic, political — and you break them. You render them helpless in the face of political oppression."
"Compromise is not a sign of the collapse of one’s moral conscience. It is a sign of its strength, for there is nothing more necessary to a moral conscience than the recognition that other people have one, too. A compromise is a knot tied tight between competing decencies.”
"You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you."
"In the course of looking deeply within ourselves, we may challenge notions that give comfort before the terrors of the world."
"I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death."
"Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live."
"It [the rocket] will free man from his remaining chains, the chains of gravity which still tie him to this planet. It will open to him the gates of heaven."
"The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge."
"Getting the Bible right and adhering to it in a literal fashion is not the goal of Christian education, it's how to think Christianly in the world that you're in."
"I think a church can be clear and articulate and confident about what it believes and what its theological beliefs are, but I think to be of Christ is to be generous in how that's applied to people that don't agree."
"...how vital the community is for how we perceive God. And when they mishandle you [...] it's not just because your social network disintegrates and we all need one, maybe it's because we actually perceive God through each other, it hurts, and it's hard to recover from that. If there's a commercial for the community nature of the Christian faith (not the individualistic nature), that's it."