Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
People will buy snake oil from anybody who seems to be selling it in a persuasive way.
It’s less the words they say than those they leave unsaid that split old friends apart.
Maybe at the heart of all our traveling is the dream of someday, somehow, getting Home.
Vocation is the place where the world's greatest need and a person's greatest joy meet.
The world speaks of holy things in the only language it knows, which is worldly language.
... in the long run, there can be no joy for anybody until there is joy finally for us all
Jesus didn't come to merely speak words that were true, He is the Word that makes us true.
If our pain doesn't destroy us, it just might transform us into truly human beings at last.
To be bored is to turn a cold shoulder to engage all that God is and has for you in the moment.
If preachers decide to preach about hope, let them preach out of what they themselves hope for.
To remember the past is to see that we are here today by grace, that we have survived as a gift.
You do not need to understand healing to be healed or know anything about blessing to be blessed.
Faith is stepping out into the unknown with nothing to guide us but a hand just beyond our grasp.
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.
The pride that keeps us from forgiving is the same pride which keeps us from accepting forgiveness.
Lord, I believe; help my unbelief' is the best any of us can do really, but thank God it is enough.
The birth of Jesus made possible not just a new way of understanding life but a new way of living it.
We find by losing. We hold fast by letting go. We become something new by ceasing to be something old.
Listen. Your life is happening. You are happening. Think back on your journey. The music of your life.
The world says, The more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.
Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Where your deep gladness meets with the deep hunger of the world, there you will find a further calling.
Words spoken in deep love or deep hate set things in motion in the human heart that can never be reversed.
Laugh till you weep. Weep till there's nothing left but to laugh at your weeping. In the end it's all one.
Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention.
In New England, especially, [faith] is like sex. It's very personal. You don't bring it out and talk about it.
The preaching is part of the reason I don't go to church. Plus, I don't know, it was never part of my tradition.
One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God
A miracle is when the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A miracle is when one plus one equals a thousand.
In his holy flirtation with the world, God occasionally drops a handkerchief. These handkerchiefs are called saints.
What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.
Preaching and writing - it's the same. Whether I'm writing to speak or writing to be read in a book, it's the same thing.
Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness. A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.
All other days have either disappeared into darkness and oblivion or not yet emerged from it. Today is the only day there is.
If you are going to proclaim the Christian faith, speak about those dimensions of it which you['ve] had some experience with.
For some people, going to church is going home. In a very profound sense, I would say the same thing. Home is where Christ is.
Religion points to that area of human experience where in one way or another man comes upon mystery as a summons to pilgrimage.
No words come easily to my lips. I think ultimately - what I like to think is that I'm in some sense hearing the mystery itself.
The trouble with really seeing and really hearing is that then we really have to do something about what we have seen and heard.
You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.
You hear as many things as you would imagine. I hear voices of people I loved once. I hear moments that took place. I hear silences.
Like a house in the rain, books were havens of permanence and protection from whatever it was that as a child I needed protection from.
Pay attention to the things that bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat because they are signs that the holy is drawing near.
I don't know how to save my own life, so anything they've found in what I've written that saved theirs - I can't take responsibility for it.
Sin and grace, absence and presence, tragedy and comedy, they divide the world between them and where they meet head on, the Gospel happens.
if you don't have doubts you're either kidding yourself or asleep. Doubts are the ants-in-the-pants of faith. They keep it alive and moving.
Prayers out of, very often, not the most religious part of me, but the most anxious part of me, the most desperately loving, fearing part of me.
You can't be too careful what you tell a child because you never know what he'll take hold of and spend the rest of his life remembering you by.
In other words to live Eternal Life in the full and final sense is to be with God as Christ is with him, and with each other as Christ is with us.
There is no event so common place but that God is present within it, always hidden, always leaving you room to recognize Him or not to recognize Him.