Something we were withholding made us weak until we found it was ourselves.

Robert Frost

Canada is not really a place where you are encouraged to have large spiritual adventures.

- Robertson Davies

'What is a Poet? A poet is an unhappy being whose heart is torn by secret sufferings, but whose lips are so strangely formed that when the sighs and cries escape them, they sound like beautiful music. His fate is like that of the unfortunate victims whom the tyrant Phalais imprisioned in a brazen bull and slowly tortured over a steady fire: their cries could not reach the tyrant's ears so as to strike terror into his heart. When they reached his ears they sounded like sweet music. And men crowd about the poet and say to him: "Sing for us soon again"; that is as much as to say: "May new sufferings torment your soul, but may your lips be formed as before; the cries would only frighten us, but the music is delicious." And the critics come too and say "Quite correct, and so it ought to be according to the rules of aesthetics." Now it is understood that a critic resmbles a poet to a hair; he only lacks the sufering in his heard and the music upon his lips.'

- Keirkegaard

Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it ourselves. We see it only in others.

--Madeleine L'Engle

Perhaps making the deepest impression are the people themselves. Famously proud and fiercely independent, the Yemeni are famously hospitable – even former hostages have gushed about the generosity of their “hosts”!

Lonely Planet “Arabian peninsula” on Yemen

(Since 1991, 200 foreigners have been abducted)

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

Marianne Williamson, [although it is often misattributed to Nelson Mandela]

In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets. Because I don't imagine any reality putting this one in the shade entirely, and I think piety forbids me to try.

-from Marilynne Robinson's Gilead

"The arts exist...to show forth the glory of God; or, to translate the same thing in terms of our psychology, to awaken and keep alive the sense of wonder in man. The success of any work of art is achieved when we say of any subject, a tree or a cloud or a human character, "I have seen that a thousand times and i never saw it before."

G.K. Chesterton

God bestows three blessings on man: to feed him like birds, dress him like flowers, and befriend him as confidant. Too many take the first two and neglect the last. Sooner or later you figure out life is constructed specifically and brilliantly to squeeze a man into association with the Owner of heaven. It is a struggle, with labor pains and thorny landscape, bloody hands and a sweaty brow, head in hands, moments of severe loneliness and questioning, moments of ache and desire. All this leads to God, I think.

- Donald Miller, Through Painted Deserts

Asceticism
is of no great importance.

There is a better way to treat one's passions
than to pile on oneself ascetic practices
which so often reveal a great ego
and create more, instead of less, self-consciousness.

If you wish
to discipline the flesh and make it a thousand times more
subject, then place on it the bridle of love.
Whoever has accepted this sweet burden of the bridle of love
will attain more
and come much further
than all the penitential practices and mortifications
that all the people in the world acting together
could ever carry out.

Whoever has found this way
needs no other.

-Meister Eckhart

Paul - How can they not intervene? Hundreds of thousands are dying.
Reporter - If people see this they’ll say “ohh my God – that’s horrible” then they go on eatin their dinners

Dialogue from Hotel Rwanda – regarding the international apathy to the genocide

They saved Jesus.


Alphonse Ojok, when asked why he was cheering for Egypt in the African Cup of Nations (January-February 2006).

...grace is not a rare and strange visitor from the mysterious depths of things, invoked only by special exercise, it is an influence as common as the weather and peristent as the heart muscle.

-Joyce Cary, Prisoner of Grace

Is a hippopotamus a hippopotamus, or just a really cool Opotamus?
- Mitch Hedberg

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."

--Christopher John Francis Boone, the fictional 15-year-old autistic narrator of Mark Haddon's the curious incident of the dog in the night-time. This is the final paragraph of the 19th chapter of a novel full of mathematical candy, for those who like to feast upon that sort of thing.

Some hae meat and cannot eat.
Some cannot eat that want it:
But we hae meat and we can eat,
Sae let the Lord be thankit.

Robbie Burns.

There is delight in the hardy life of the open.

-Theodore Roosevelt, quotation etched into a granite tablet on Theodore Roosevelt Island, Washington, D.C.

Pig – let me speak his praise – is no less provocative of the appetite, than he is satisfactory to the criticalness of the censorious palate. The strong man may batten on him, and the weakling refuseth not his mild juices.

-Charles Lamb, in A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig

The exclusion of the weak and insignificant, the seemingly useless people from everyday Christian life in community may actually mean the exclusion of Christ; for in the poor sister or brother, Christ is knocking at the door.

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

You learn to read so you can identify the reality in which you live, so that you can become a protagonist of history rather than a spectator.

The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. What I want is so simple I almost can't say it: elementary kindness. Enough to eat, enough to go around. The possibility that kids might one day grow up to be neither the destroyers nor the destroyed.

- Barbara Kingsolver, Animal Dreams

Lord, purge our eyes to see
Within the seed a tree,
Within the glowing egg a bird,
Within the shroud a butterfly:

Till taught by such, we see
Beyond all creatures Thee,
And hearken for Thy tender word,
And hear it, "Fear not: it is I."

--Christina Rossetti
(Lines 1-8 of an untitled poem from Verses (1893), to which the disappointingly straightforward title, "Judge not according to the appearance," has been added.)

"Let your soul gravitate to the love, y'all, y'all"
Black eyed peas - Where is the love?


So the Black Eyed Peas don't really rock my world all that often but their song "Where is the love" tells it like it is y'all

ahh! but you are tall! you will die early.

- what i was told by a woman in the village of mukagoro, uganda

"Perhaps it's true that you can't believe in a god without loving a human being or love a human being without believing in a god. They use the phrase 'make love,' don't they? But which of us are creative enough to 'make' love? We can only be loved - if we are lucky."

-Querry, in Graham Greene's A Burnt-Out Case

Lord, to those who hunger, give bread. And to those who have bread, give the hunger for justice.
— Latin American prayer