I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isacc Newton
Category: Quotes (Page 7 of 11)
I divested myself of despair
and fear when I came here.Now there is no more catching
one’s own eye in the mirror,there are no bad books, no plastic,
no insurance premiums, and of courseno illness. Contrition
does not exist, nor gnashingof teeth. No one howls as the first
clod of earth hits the casket.The poor we no longer have with us.
Our calm hearts strike only the hour,and God, as promised, proves
to be mercy clothed in light.
Jane Kenyon
Notes from the Other Side
Love is the hardest lesson in Christianity; but, for that reason, it should be most our care to learn it.
-William Penn
I heard Jeffrey Greenman, President of Regent College say, in a talk on ethics:
You grow in the direction of what you ask questions about.
My corollary: It’s when I think I’ve got it figured out that I stop asking questions. Life is a good corrective to such an attitude. God isn’t complacent about our complacency.
Quoting Miroslav Volf:
We are in a major crisis of legitimacy and trust. No better time to renew commitment to trustworthiness, as individuals and communities.
Well said.
[Jesus] demands of his first followers a living witness to a simple life on the edge, because once you are at the visible center, once you are on the top, you have too much to prove and too much to protect… The only free positions in this world are at the bottom and at the edges of things. Everywhere else, there is too much to maintain – an image to promote and a fear of losing it all – which ends up controlling your whole life.
– Richard Rohr, in Dancing Standing Still; Healing the World from a Place of Prayer
Alan Jacobs, in his review of The Complete Words of W. H. Auden in the September/October 2016 issue of Books & Culture quotes an entry from a book written late in Auden’s life entitled A Certain World: A Commonplace Book:
Let me close with one more reflection by Auden, one of the longest in A Certain World, from the entry on “Friday, Good”; it exemplifies the wisdom and acuity of mind that this great man possessed, even in the somewhat diminished last years of his life:
Just as we were all, potentially, in Adam when he fell, so we were all, potentially, in Jerusalem on that first Good Friday before there was an Easter, a Pentecost, a Christian, or a Church. It seems to me worth while asking ourselves who we should have been and what we should have been doing. None of us, I’m certain, will imagine himself as one of the Disciples, cowering in an agony of spiritual despair and physical terror. Very few of us are big wheels enough to see ourselves as Pilate, or good churchmen enough to see ourselves as a member of the Sanhedrin. In my most optimistic mood I see myself as a Hellenized Jew from Alexandria visiting an intellectual friend. We are walking along, engaged in philosophical argument. Our path takes us past the base of Golgotha. Looking up, we see an all-too-familiar sight – three crosses surrounded by a jeering crowd. Frowning with prim distaste, I say, “It’s disgusting the way the mob enjoy such things. Why can’t the authorities execute criminals humanely and in private by giving them hemlock to drink, as they did with Socrates?” Then, averting my eyes from the disagreeable spectacle, I resume our fascinating discussion about the nature of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Yow. I think that’s all too often how we walk through life. Or we look for miracles while creation proclaims all around us.
In his Journal, George Fox quotes Margaret Fell:
And so he went on, and said, “That Christ was the Light of the world, and lighteth every man that cometh into the world; and that by this light they might be gathered to God.” I stood up in my pew, and wondered at his doctrine, for I had never heard such before. And then he went on, and opened the scriptures, and said, “The scriptures were the prophets’ words, and Christ’s and the apostles’ words, and what, as they spoke, they enjoyed and possessed, and had it from the Lord,” and said, “Then what had any to do with the scriptures, but as they came to the Spirit that gave them forth? You will say, ‘Christ saith this, and the apostles say this’ but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?” This opened me so, that it cut me to the heart; and then I saw clearly we were all wrong. So I sat down in my pew again, and cried bitterly: and I cried in my spirit to the Lord, “We are all thieves; we are all thieves; we have taken the scriptures in words, and know nothing of them in ourselves.”
What is morally wrong can never be advantageous, even when it enables you to make some gain that you believe to be to your advantage. The mere act of believing that some wrongful course of action constitutes an advantage is pernicious.
-Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 BCE)
Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.
― Winston Churchill
And Dan Carlin says this is what it is like to do a podcast, too.