Uncategorized Quotes - Page 43

If Mere Christianity helps make Christianity comprehensible, Orthodoxy makes it weird again.

Lord, I'll embrace whatever it is you want me to do, but please, please let me know what it is." - Father Kevin Thrall.

Just write. That's my only tip. And read. I guess that's two.

Trust those you love, and that love you in return," she said. "It will hurt more if they betray you, but at least you'll still know joy." - Zusa

He doesn't have a soul?" she shrieked, horrified."That explains why he's such a dick," Tree muttered.

Preaching never edifies a prayerless soul.

Take it all, all of it!" Greg cried out. "These things here...I've been making them better, fixing them. It doesn't matter...they don't matter. I've been here before." He paused to try to collect himself. "It's my past, my present...these things--" He lifted a hand out to the objects around him. "These things are me." Now whispering, "Can't you see me?

The emptiness made her insides ache.

Let's start with what we can be thankful for, and get our mind into that vibration, and then watch the good that starts to come, because one thought leads to another thought." -Bob Proctor

Every painting tells a story.

There is more ability to meditate in a rabbit than in one thousand Buddhists.

It is possible to induce incorrect notions of cause and effect in most people in just a few minutes. All that is necessary is to expose them to rewards which they believe they are generating based on their actions when in fact the rewards are randomly awarded. People will latch onto any seeming success and repeat it, even when they have to explain repeated failures as well. It appears practically impossible, or at least very rare, for humans not to be influenced by immediate experiences of concrete results. This is true even if the experiences turn out to have limited theoretical validity. The moment of surprise is not when people repeat alchemical failures but when they begin to do something else.

I was the climber of a sheer cliff, dragging myself on bleeding hands towards a summit that I'd never reach and sometimes didn't want to reach. The things I cared about were the hooks I'd driven into the rock face. Depression snapped them, one by one, one by one. My only certainty was the fall.

Absence is the figure of privation; simultaneously, I desire and I need. Desire is squashed against need: that is the obsessive phenomenon of all amorous sentiment.

Buying a book is not enough... You must absorb the knowledge it contains. Your personalized knowledge is not what's on your shelf, but how much you put into yourself!

To be free, you have to examine authority, the whole skeleton of authority, tearing to pieces the whole dirty thing. And that requires energy, actual physical energy, and also it demands psychological energy. By the energy is destroyed, is wasted when one is in conflict. So when there is the understanding of the whole process of conflict, there is the ending of conflict, there is abundance of energy. Then you can proceed tearing the house that you have built throughout the centuries and that has no meaning at all. You know, to destroy is to create. We must destroy, not the buildings, not the social or economic system, - this comes about daily – but the psychological, the unconscious and the rationally, individually, deeply and superficially. We must tear through all that to be utterly defenseless, because you must be defenseless to love and have affection. Then you see and understand ambition, authority, and you begin to see when authority is necessary and at what level. Then there is no authority of learning, no authority of knowledge, no authority of capacity; no authority that function assumes and which becomes status. To understand all authority – of the gurus, of the Masters, and others – requires a very sharp mind, a clear brain, not a muddy brain, not a dull brain.

But sooner or later we find that not everything is to our liking in this book. It starts out sweet to our taste; and then we find it doesn't sit well with us at all, it becomes bitter in our stomachs. Finding ourselves in this book is most pleasant, flattering even, and then we find that the book is not written to flatter us, but to involve us in a reality, God's reality, that doesn't cater to our fantasies of ourselves.

...Don't insult readers by questioning the extent of their imaginations. Most need only to be nudged to solve a good mystery.

I'll never suppress my identity -- that's like filing away your fingerprints so the money can slide into your pockets easier.

An orchestra of temple bells and chanting erupted suddenly like a pleasing drizzle.

Music is the sweetest language for hearts, kindest prayer for souls, peaceful breeze for minds, and a magical sail for imaginations.

You will be what you really want to be.

Do good even if no one is watching you and do it as if everyone is watching you.

When I say that deciding to not kill myself was the worst part, I should clarify that I don’t mean it in a retrospective sense. From where I am now, it seems like a solid enough decision. But at the time, it felt like I had been dragging myself through the most miserable, endless wasteland, and—far in the distance—I had seen the promising glimmer of a slightly less miserable wasteland.

The object of your desire is not an object.

The environment we create can help heal us or fracture us. This is true not just for buildings and landscapes but also for interactions and relationships.

Wherever I travel to, I encounter great souls.

The sun rises every morning and sheds light, vanquishing the night's darkness. The rooster also rises every morning only, unlike the sun, he simply makes noise. But the darkness of the night is dispelled by sunshine, not by the rooster's crowing. The world can use more light and less noise. Wherever I can, I want to be light.

I want to share my story, and I want to know yours. I believe with all my heart that sharing our stories, the real, ugly, broken ones, is one of the most powerful things in the world, because to share our story we must first accept it. We must own it. We must stop running from it or shoving it into the corner when company comes over. To share our story is to admit that we've been changed.

In my community, mental health isn't taken seriously enough. Therapy is replaced by prayer. Tears are a sign of weakness. When you are different, you are told to change. And really, what does that do? It isolates desperate, vulnerable people and creates victims.

We all look for strategies or techniques that will free us from the pain of relationships and the hard work good relationships demand. We hope that better planning, more effective communication, clear role definitions, conflict resolution strategies, gender studies, and personality typing--to name just a few -- will make the difference. There may be value in these things, but if they were all we needed, Jesus' life, death, and resurrection would be unnecessary or, at best, redundant. Skills and techniques appeal to us because they promise that relational problems can be fixed by tweaking our behavior without altering the bent of our hearts. But the Bible says something very different. It says that Christ is the only real hope for relationships because only he can dig deep enough to address the core motivations and desires of our hearts.Most dangerous aspect of your relationships is not your weakness, but your delusions of strength. Self-reliance is almost always a component of a bad relationship.

Fizz had a phrase for those manic occasions when you scaled every final peak, fell off the other side and passed out. Mightysatiety. The oblivion of maximum pleasure.

A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.

If Life worked on auto mode then manual mode for photography would have never existed.

This anti-description, for want of a better way of putting it, had made something clear to her by a reverse kind of exposition: while he talked she began to see herself as a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank. Yet this shape, even while its content remained unknown, gave her for the first time since the incident a sense of who she now was.

I was Baptist and had always prayed, in a damp squint, for things not to happen. Sils was a Catholic, and so she prayed for things to happen, for things to come true. She prayed for love here and now. I prayed for no guns.

It is in our nature to enjoy atrocity so long as it continues to shock and remains comfortably removed from our own lives.

On the Writing Process:"When in doubt, take it out.,

If there is one thing worse than self-pity, it was other people's pity.

To give light to others, you must first take light from others!

I also had to come tonight to apologize. If you need to go to Mexico to finish this process off, then I understand. I was wrong to criticize you for it or even imply that I had some kind of say in it. One of the greatest things about you is that in the end, you always make smart decisions. Can’t always say the same for myself. Whatever you need to do, I’ll support you.

This mix of love and hate, this blend of trust and hurt I have for him is so confusing even I can't understand it.He leaves, and I break.

mYou learn more from your mistakes and failures than from any degree of success. Success can only be grasped for a moment before it becomes a distant oasis not to be found again unless you thirst for the knowledge found in the well fed by your mistakes and failures.

Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself".

Live each day as if it were the first day of marriage and the last day of vacation.

When you see the sadness, failure, and darknessFind the opportunity to turn on the light of success.

Of course you can trust me," Jake Hix said. "We read the same books.

The sky was a feather blanket of clouds, save for one blue hole in the fabric. A blue cloud in a white sky.

Teaching is different today. Teachers don’t just stand at the board and lecture while the kids take notes. What we’re ultimately teaching them is to teach themselves.

Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love's path is communication.

I tried to lose myself in school and friends as best as I was able, trying to put Dorian's world out of my mind. But that was pretty much impossible with Clarrisa's constant, homicidally cheerful presence, which was, I supposed, something like making friends with a live grenade.

Through recognizing and realizing the empty essence, instead of being selfish and self-centered, one feels very open and free

To know that you are loved gives you confidence, security and fulfilment in life.

Nobody has to do anything wrong to end up living a life that feels like it’s not their own, all they have to do is take a step back, and hope for the best.

Depression is not sobbing and crying and giving vent, it is plain and simple reduction of feeling.

Eventually everyone will give up on you

We are what we are...

Many people have got caught up in the belief known as the “Law of Attraction.” They believe that by their thoughts, affirmations, and other “attraction” exercises they will become wealthy. However, the Tanakh wisely says, “In all work there is profit, but mere talk produces only poverty.” (CJB, Proverbs 14:23). Only through work it is possible to produce results that create wealth and simply talking about wealth will not produce any results. The idea that wealth can come through thoughts or affirmations is a fantasy. “A hard worker has plenty of food, but a person who chases fantasies ends up in poverty” (CJB, Proverbs 28:19).

...thinking all this maximalism would somehow generate happiness?

The method of addition is quite charming if it involves adding to the self such things as a cat, a dog, roast pork, love of the sea or of cold showers. But the matter becomes less idyllic if a person decides to add love for communism, for the homeland, for Mussolini, for Roman Catholicism or atheism, for fascism or anti-fascism. In both cases the method remains exactly the same: a person stubbornly defending the superiority of cats over other animals is doing basically the same thing as one who maintains that Mussolini was the sole saviour of Italy: he is proud of this attribute of the self and he tries to make this attribute (a cat or Mussolini) acknowledged and loved by everyone.Here is that strange paradox to which all people cultivating the self by way of the addition method are subject: they use addition in order to create a unique, inimitable self, yet because they automatically become propagandists for the added attributes, they are actually doing everything in their power to make as many others as possible similar to themselves; as a result, their uniqueness (so painfully gained) quickly begins to disappear.