576 shaares
"This much I know: you have to forget your own worries for the sake of others, for the sake of those whom you love."
"It's better to be a heretic than a liar. A heretic these days is a temporary occupation: the sin lies in telling the truth too early."
"I believe the crisis in the U.S. church has almost nothing to do with being liberal or conservative; it has everything to do with giving up on the faith and discipline of our Christian baptism and settling for a common, generic U.S. identity that is part patriotism, part consumerism, part violence, and part affluence."
"God is the web, the energy, the space, the light—not captured in them, as if any of those concepts were more real than what unites them—but revealed in that singular, vast net of relationship that animates everything that is."
"Relationship is the fundamental truth of this world of appearance."
"Nature, the soul, love, and God, one recognizes through the heart, and not through the reason… Reason is a tool, a machine, which is driven by the spiritual fire."
"The Creator does not live apart from creation but spans and suffuses it. When I take a breath, God's Holy Spirit enters me... Like everything else on earth, I am an embodied soul, who leaps to life when I recognize my kin."
"No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night."
"The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is-it’s to imagine what is possible."
"Be grateful for what you have and be ready to share it when the time comes."
"When Christianity entered into the world, people were not Christians, and the difficulty was to become a Christian. Nowadays the difficulty in becoming a Christian is that one must cease to become a Christian."
"And further, beloved brethren, what is it, what a great thing is it, how pertinent, how necessary, that pestilence and plague which seems horrible and deadly, searches out the righteousness of each one, and examines the minds of the human race, to see whether they who are in health tend the sick; whether relations affectionately love their kindred; whether masters pity their languishing servants; whether physicians do not forsake the beseeching patients; whether the fierce suppress their violence; whether the rapacious can quench the ever insatiable ardour of their raging avarice even by the fear of death; whether the haughty bend their neck; whether the wicked soften their boldness; whether, when their dear ones perish, the rich, even then bestow anything, and give, when they are to die without heirs. Even although this mortality conferred nothing else, it has done this benefit to Christians and to God's servants that we begin gladly to desire martyrdom as we learn not to fear death. These are trainings for us, not deaths: they give the mind the glory of fortitude; by contempt of death they prepare for the crown."
"Where do I get my ideas from? You might as well have asked that of Beethoven. He was goofing around in Germany like everybody else, and all of a sudden this stuff came gushing out of him. It was music. I was goofing around like everybody else in Indiana, and all of a sudden stuff came gushing out. It was disgust with civilization."
"Science fiction is the realism of our time."
"Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest."
"The Christian faith, while wildly misrepresented in so much of American culture, is really about death and resurrection. It's about how God continues to reach into the graves we dig for ourselves and pull us out, giving us new life, in ways both dramatic and small."
"Solitude is that human situation in which I keep myself company."
"Our time is now. The era into which we are born is the era for which we have responsibility, the era for which we are meant to be blessing."
"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."
"We cannot do everything & there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, & to do it very, very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord’s grace to enter and do the rest."