Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Coming home from very lonely places, all of us go a little mad: whether from great personal success, or just an all-night drive, we are the sole survivors of a world no one else has ever seen.
I hate how hard spiritual transformation is and how long it takes. I hate thinking about how many people have gone to church for decades and remain joyless or judgmental or bitter or superior.
Art is built on the deepest themes of human meaning: good and evil, beauty and ugliness, life and death, love and hate. No other story has incarnated those themes more than the story of Jesus.
Politics, after all, is largely about power. And power goes to the core of our issues of control and narcissism and need to be right and tendency to divide the human race into 'us' vs. 'them.'
It is a throne of grace that God in Christ is represented to us upon; but yet is is a throne still whereon majesty and glory do reside, and God is always to be considered by us as on a throne.
Great leaders understand that historical success tends to produce stable and inwardly focused organizations, and these outfits, in turn, reinforce a feeling of contentment with the status quo.
Bad theology dishonors God and hurts people. Churches that sever the root of truth may flourish for a season, but they will wither eventually or turn into something besides a Christian church.
The Christian - the biblical - concept of mercy toward wrongdoers only exists in relation to justice. Showing mercy, in relation to wrongdoing, means treating someone better than they deserve.
It turns out that moving our muscles produces proteins that travel through the bloodstream and into the brain, where they play pivotal roles in the mechanisms of our highest thought processes.
In the never-ending battle between order and chaos, clutter sides with chaos every time. Anything that you possess that does not add to your life or your happiness eventually becomes a burden.
Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929
Generally, traditional businesses were slow to recognize the way in which legalized gambling captured dollars from across the entire spectrum of the various consumer markets, but now they know
Caught in the self-centered dream, only suffering; holding to self-centered thoughts, exactly the dream; each moment, life as it is, the only teacher; being just this moment, compassion's way.
And what does every child believe every adult capable of doing? Of actually being able to bend the world to an inner desire, exactly what the child is busily practicing in his passionate play.
If Christianity is dull and boring, if it is a burden and not a blessing, then most likely we are involved in a project, not a Person - a system not a Savior, rules rather than a relationship.
Most of us have hoped and prayed for something to happen a certain way, but it didn't. And when this happened, we had a choice to make: to react with offense toward God or to trust Him anyway.
[T]he Christian is unable to sin and not care ... They may sin, but they cannot do so comfortably and continually. They are very much aware of their wrong actions, and they are very miserable.
Making sweeping statements such as 'no sweets ever again' has never worked before, and it's not going to work now. You'll get quickly overwhelmed and punt on any positive momentum you created.
The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable.
sometimes there are reasons for our fears that we can’t quite explain. Sometimes it’s just something we feel in our bones, something we know to be true, but would sound foolish to anyone else.
And for the rest of the night, he couldn’t quite forget the smell of her perfume. Or maybe it was the soft sound of her chuckle. Or maybe it was neither of those things. Maybe it was just her.
In my experience, when you're writing, you want the truth, and you don't want to be apologetic in any way. But there is something in writing, the complexity of it, that works against that aim.
If you're a kid who is always on the outside hoping to be on the inside, you're watching a lot. You're trying to figure out how to become a normal person in a society that considers you weird.
I don't care what people think about me. I care what people think about my work. As a young woman, I was so eager to please that I served others' happiness and even their values before my own.
I think, first and foremost, Marie Antoinette was intellectually impoverished. She really had never been introduced to the notion of abstract thinking - of thinking at all in any profound way.
Life finds its balance. Children grow up. Second chances come along. In the meantime, I could choose to savor this moment. What good would it do to allow annoyance to interfere with gratitude?
Like a cartoon world, where the figures are flat and outlined in black, jerking through some kind of goofy story that might be real funny if it weren't for the cartoon figures being real guys.
It's a power that I can't explain. As it flows and it grows and it shapes my faith. There've been hundreds of moments I can't deny. When it brushe against the fire or dwelt in the Fire of God.
And while seeing Trent in his tighty-whities would make my decade, I’d found out long ago that I couldn’t stay mad at a man wearing nothing but underwear. They looked so charmingly vulnerable.
I'm not at all against white people adopting black children, because we're all human beings who need to give love and be nurtured in safety, but I do think it's better to be adopted by blacks.
Right now everything looks so strange to me, as if I don't belong here. It's me that's out of place. And the worst thing is that I feel there's somewhere I do belong, but I just can't find it.
I enjoy working with images of maps, flags, and different cultures around the world. I've always liked geography and geopolitics and it's fun to be able to play with the world political order.
Will you stay with me ” she asked. Her voice was the thinnest whisper almost canceled out by a low groan of thunder.... Forever ” he whispered back. The sweet sound of his voice filled her up.
One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart.
As a leader, it is vitally important that you keep in touch with your boss on a regular, sacrosanct basis. Chances are your boss can provide an aerial view that will make your path more clear.
It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age - that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.
Cooking is like love. You don't have to be particularly beautiful or very glamorous, or even very exciting to fall in love. You just have to be interested in it. It's the same thing with food.
They taught me that all life forms are important to each other in our common quest for happiness and survival. That there is more to life than just yourself, your own family, or your own kind.
There are many different rivers that lead into despair: there's poverty; there's political repression; there's gender apartheid - there's a sense of culture loss; there's religious fanaticism.
Aquamarine is an airy blue with a dreamy feel. Cool and calming, ethereal Aquamarine is a shade with a wet and watery feel. Open and expansive, this restful blue also acts as a stress reducer.
I think young people really do care. They want to build their life on something that's solid and makes sense, that's rational, that's not built on mythology, make-believe and wishful thinking.
No group of people has been more unjustly maligned in the twentieth century than the Puritans. As a result, we approach the Puritans with an enormous baggage of culturally ingrained prejudice.
To laugh is to risk appearing a fool, to weep is to risk appearing too sentimental, to reach out for another is to risk involvement, and to expose feelings is to risk exposing one's true self.
I was one of those fortunate individuals who grew up in a large, passionate, demonstrative Italian family where we were taught to love as naturally as we breathed and ate giant bowls of pasta!
I would have artists be convinced that the supreme skill and art in painting consists in knowing how to use black and white... because it is light and shade that make objects appear in relief.
The only way in which one human being can properly attempt to influence another is by encouraging him to think for himself, instead of endeavoring to instill ready-made opinions into his head.
Nobody sees reality whole; we all need others to show us the parts of it that they see better than we do. Nobody sees reality with total accuracy; we all need others to correct our own vision.
If you read one book a week, starting at the age of 5, and live to be 80, you will have read a grand total of 3,900 books, a little over one-tenth of 1 percent of the books currently in print.
From our earliest beginnings, we have been a nation obsessed with sex, titillated by it at the same time that we fear it, elaborating rules to contain it at the same time that we violate them.