Uncategorized Quotes - Page 495

At the end of the school day, we walked the long, cold way home feeling happy and hungry. There we found a warm fire, country ham with gravy and hot biscuits, and a mother to hug us! If snow blew under the doors that night, what did it matter? Christmas time was just around the corner.

Forget that blind ambition, and learn to trust your intuition.

As Paul Tillich put it, suffering introduces you to yourself and reminds you that you are not the person you thought you were.

Instead of turning our heads from pain, we merge with it, neither holding on to it nor pushing it away, becoming instead an instrument of transformation. Recently, on my early morning drive to a health club, I saw a deer in the middle lane, trying to get up, but obviously crippled. Her eyes looked confused and frightened. As I drove by, I breathed in her pain and breathed out a blessing. I could feel a dark cloud swirling inside of me, but I also had an image of a deer running freely in the woods. I can never know if it helped her, but something loosened inside of me. Instead of turning away from her pain, I joined her. It was then I realized more deeply the power of Tonglin...When you feel hurt, confused, lonely, or sad, breathe into your pain, feel it, be with it, then breathe out an image of clarity, light, and a blessing. This alone will start to change your life.

No moral code or ethical principle, no piece of scripture or holy teaching, can be summoned to defend what we have allowed our country to become.

Running alone can allow you to hit the mute button on the world... and take full advantage of exercise's stress-busting benefits. 'Running alone can be a meditative experience where you get to really think and concentrate or completely clear your mind and zone out,' a psychotherapist Michelle Maidenberg says, ... 'You have to practise letting go of the inner chatter that can get in the way of what you want to accomplish,' sports psychologist Cindra Kamphoff says, 'And that's something you have to do on your own.

When your dreams are clearer and stronger than your sleep, night becomes a mere extension of day

Then the Warrior realizes that these repeated experiences have but one aim: to teach him what he does not want to learn.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people isn’t really aboutresources that were available to them when they started out, Instead its their resourcefulness or personal initiative that makes the difference.

Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? Are we not perhaps afraid to give up something significant, something unique, something that makes life so beautiful? Do we not then risk ending up diminished and deprived of our freedom? . . . No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed. Only in this friendship do we experience beauty and liberation. And so, today, with great strength and great conviction, on the basis of long personal experience of life, I say to you, dear young people: Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything. When we give ourselves to him, we receive a hundredfold in return. Yes, open, open wide the doors to Christ – and you will find true life. Amen.

Hello?” I ask. No one is there. Not a word. Not a whisper. Not a single sound resonating from the other side of the receiver. “Hello? Anyone there?” I ask again. Repeating myself. I am beginning to feel rather anxious now. Scared, would be a better word to use. Shivers have begun to creep up my spinal cord, and I can feel the urgency of goose pimples begin to line up on by frightened pale skin.

What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning...

The mother-women seemed to prevail that summer at Grand Isle. It was easy to know them, fluttering about with extended, protecting wings when any harm, real or imaginary, threatened their precious brood. They were women who idolized their children, worshiped their husbands, and esteemed it a holy privilege to efface themselves as individuals and grow wings as ministering angels.

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

Some human beings in their craftiness thought they can pretend to be good when they are actually bad.

Trust opens the door that pain had sealed shut.

I gulped, mesmerized by his hypnotic eyes and charming, spearmint smile, and uttered something intelligent like,"Uh, huh." ~ from Dragon Flight

If you learn from every mistake, you never fail at anything.

Nothing happens without waiting. The seed in the ground does not become a tree overnight. It goes through seasons, nurturing, watering, pruning before it bears fruit.

God desires that man should be. God does not wish to be alone. The meaning of existence is the conquest of loneliness, the acquisition of kinship and nearness.

You are never too old to learn something new, or too young to learn too much.

The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

The streak of bleach in my hair is as obvious as ever. Am I really going out in public like this? I push my hair backward and forward a few times - but I can't hide it. Maybe I could walk along with my hand carelessly positioned at my head, as if I'm thinking hard. I attempt a few casual, pensive poses in the mirror."Is your head all right?"I swivel round in shock to see Nathaniel at the open door, wearing a plaid shirt and jeans."Er...fine," I say, my hand still glued to my head. "I was just..."Oh, there's no point. I bring my hand down from my hair and Nathaniel regards the streak for a moment."It looks nice," he says. "Like a badger.""A badger?" I say, affronted. "I don't look like a badger.""Badgers are beautiful creatures," says Nathaniel with a shrug. "I'd rather look like a badger than a stoat.

How could I have never told anyone what He had done for me? Nothing else had worked. Nothing had been able to break the chains that kept me living on the edge. Nothing....except the gentleness of His touch.

learning texts is worth doing not because it's easy but because it's hard.

I was moving in a narrow range between busy distractedness and a pervasive sadness whose granules seemed to enter each cell, weighing it down... I ghosted between islands of anxiety... a fatigue that dulled my zest, decanted it. Sorrow felt like a marble coat I couldn’t shed.

One day you will learn that love does not always betray you.

There are times when looking on the bright side takes a lot ot work. I'm taking a break from it tonight. I'll be back at it tomorrow.

Life's waters flow from darkness. Search the darkness, don't run from it.

Discipline is a bridge built through everyday action.

I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.

If you hold a candle close to you, its flame rises. And if you hold it away from you, its flame shrinks. The same way you hold a candle close to you, keep all your plans, aspirations, projects, and dreams close to you too. Do not share your plans or goals until you complete them, because as you hold your candle away from you, your goals can shrink from the envious eyes of others. Animosity, jealousy and resentment can put out your flame before it grows.

Tangaloor, fire-brightFlame-foot, farthest walkerYour hunter speaksIn need he walksIn need, but never in fear.

We are gradually losing the art of silence. Of walking down the street lost in our own thoughts. Of closing the door to our rooms and being quiet. Of sitting on a park bench and just thinking. We may fear silence because we fear what we might hear from the deepest parts of ourselves. We may be afraid to hear that "still small" voice. What might it say? Might it ask us to change?

To be able to die consciously, we need to prepare for death while we are still living.Only if we live consciously, we can die consciously.Only a meditator is able to die consciously as life is an opportunity to prepare for death. Meditation is a death, a death of the ego. Death is not in opposition of life, death is the finale, the crescendo of life. How we die shows us how we have been living. Death is not an end, death is a new beginning, a new life.

In spite of our sinfulness, in spite of the darkness surrounding our souls, the Grace of the Holy Spirit, conferred by baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, still shines in our hearts with the inextinguishable light of Christ ... and when the sinner turns to the way of repentance the light smooths away every trace of the sins committed, clothing the former sinner in the garments of incorruption, spun of the Grace of the Holy Spirit. It is this acquisition of the Holy Spirit about which I have been speaking.

The days she was finally brought out of the house would later be remembered as a day when shadows seemed blacker, as if something more lingered in those darkened spaces.

I try to read and write something interesting every day.

Life is fast, and I’ve found it’s easy to confuse the miraculous for the mundane, so I’m slowing down, way down, in order to give my full presence to the extraordinary that infuses each moment and resides in every one of us.

Madam, I have just come from a country where people are hanged if they talk.

I remember all the things we said we'd doAnd how not a single thing we said was true

The light must illuminate.

I love the sound of people thinking.

The art of surrender is the art of getting out of the way of your own growth.

We have to believe going through darkness will eventually bring us light. Especially when night is out forever.

There is no denying that there is evil in this world but the light will always conquer the darkness.

My desperation is deliberate. Despondency's a pheromone.

God will make straight my path.

Nobody ever talks about the pyramids that weren't built, the books that weren't written, the songs that weren't sung. Stop letting your fear condemn you to mediocrity. Get out of your own way. Your dreams are a poetic reflection of your soul's wishes. Be courageous enough to follow them. There is no greater time than now to experience the full power of your potential. Make this the day you take the first step in the beautiful journey of bringing your dreams to life.

Meditation practice is neither holding on nor avoiding; it is a settling back into the moment, opening to what is there.

He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.

There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth. On! On! his heart seemed to cry. Evening would deepen above the sea, night fall upon the plains, dawn glimmer before the wanderer and show him strange fields and hills and faces. Where?

In life you dream, you step out and you make it happen.

Where you live should not determine whether you live, or whether you die.

It will be a very long time before I trust you ever, ever - OK, I trust you again.

In a way it was worth it, she thought, except that it was such a total waste.

When sharing your news, you might come across some disgruntled parent-folk. You know, the kind who snort and say ruefully, "If there's anyplace you want to travel to, go now." Don't let them squelch your joy, dear K: these are the kind of people who never went anywhere before they had babies either.

Those who were raised in poverty and have been successful to overcome the shame of it, understands the hardship of those who are left behind.

Some of the greatest insights we have ever experienced were those we least expected.

While those who continuously get themselves the supply of growth, smile through life.