quotes.mattlaff.com
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"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."
"All the way to heaven is heaven."
"It seems we only know what life is when we know what death is."
"More isn't always better. Better is better."
"Focusing on the most beneficial activities to the exclusion of less beneficial alternatives can leave you better off than trying to clutter your life with everything that might offer some value."
"We either add to the darkness of indifference and out-and-out evil which surrounds us or we light a candle to see by."
"Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre."
"The essential problem of ongoingness is that one must contemplate time as that very time, that very subject of one’s contemplation, disappears."
"The experiences that demanded I yield control to a force greater than my will — diagnoses, deaths, unbreakable vows — weren’t the beginnings or the ends of anything. They were the moments when I was forced to admit that beginnings and ends are illusory. That history doesn’t begin or end, but it continues. For just a moment, with great effort, I could imagine my will as a force that would not disappear but redistribute when I died, and that all life contained the same force, and that I needn’t worry about my impending death because the great responsibility of my life was to contain the force for a while and then relinquish it."