“Language is very powerful. It does not just describe reality. It creates the reality it describes.” — Desmond Tutu
“There is something mysterious and sacred about being alive. It’s an awareness of something that is too important to forget.” — Christina Feldman
“All real living is meeting.” — Martin Buber
“What I want in my life is compassion, a flow between myself and others based on a mutual giving of the heart.” — Dr. Marshall B. Rosenberg
“Listening with ears is less fine than listening with the heart.” — Hsu-T’ang Chih-Yu
“Feeling emotions is what makes life rich.” — Daniel Goleman
“Learning to stand in somebody else’s shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s how peace begins … Empathy is a quality of character that can change the world.” — Barack Obama
“You must love in such a way that the person you love feels free.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
“When your heart speaks, take good notes.” — Joseph Campbell
“My grandmother told me: “Never hide your ‘green hair’ — they can see it anyway.” — Angeles Arrien
“Love isn’t a state of perfect caring. It’s an active noun like struggle. To love someone is to strive to accept that person exactly as the way he or she is, right here and now.” — Fred Rogers
“May you fall madly in love this year … in love with someone who unhinges your tired trajectory, in love with a spouse of several years who might be aching for lightning, in love with demanding children and crazy relatives … in love with the particular pedigree of genius insanity that has perhaps claimed you in spite of your reluctance … and certainly in love with an animal, a cloud, a redwood, the wild … these at least once a day. May you fall in love with this fragile jewel of a world, with hard work, real learning, just causes, petitioning and prayers. May you fall in love with wonder itself, with the grand mystery, with all that feeds you in order that you may live … and with the responsibility that this confers. May you fall in love with heartbreak and seeing how it’s stitched into everything. May you fall in love with the natural order of things and with tears, tenderness and humility. May this be a magnificent year for you. May you fall deeply, madly, hopelessly, inextinguishably in love.” — Rachelle Lamb
“Our maturity will be judged by how well we are able to agree to disagree and yet continue to love one another, to care for one another and cherish one another, and seek the greater good of the other.” ~ Desmond Tutu
“This is the message: God does not rise up in grandeur, but lowers himself into littleness. Littleness is the path that he chose to draw near to us, to touch our hearts, to save us and to bring us back to what really matters.” — Pope Francis
“What you do for yourself … any gesture of kindness, any gesture of gentleness, any gesture of honest and clear seeing toward yourself … will affect how you experience your world. In fact, it will transform how you experience the world. What you do for yourself, you’re doing for others, and what you do for others, you’re doing for yourself.” — Pema Chodron
“Walk cheerfully over the earth seeing [or answering] that of God in everyone.” — Quaker saying
“On particularly rough days, I like to remind myself that my track record for getting through bad days so far is 100%, and that’s pretty good.” — Anonymous
“If you must look back, do so forgivingly. If you will look forward, do so prayerfully. But the wisest course would be to be present in the present gratefully.” — Maya Angelou
“It is important to be a seeker. But it’s also important to acknowledge when we’ve actually found something.” — Sue Monk Kidd
“Now, every time I witness a strong person, I want to know: What darkness did you conquer in your story? Mountains do not rise without earthquakes.” — Katherine MacKenett
“Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Love is a verb. It’s not a permanent state of enthusiasm. It’s not about finding the right person, it’s about being the right person. If you just want to be dazzled, then you will have an adventure. You will be infatuated. You will have a love story, maybe, but you won’t have a life story. And a life story is different than a love story.” — Esther Perel
“Each time you blink, if you pause to let your heart flutter with nothing but the air to flutter about, each time you open your eyes, you begin again. It’s true. This is the moment of resurrection, the opening of your eyes.” — Mark Nepo
“God breaks the heart again and again and again until it stays open.” — Hazrat Inayat Khan
“Between stimulus and response there’s a space; In that space lies our power to choose our response; In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” — Viktor Frankl
“If you feel something calling you to dance or write or paint or sing, please refuse to worry about whether you’re good enough. Just do it.” — Glennon Doyle Melton
“Rarely, if ever are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.” — bell hooks
“My father always used to say, “Don’t raise your voice. Improve your argument.” Good sense
does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is
always the best arbiter of what is right.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Learning to label emotions with a more nuanced vocabulary can be absolutely transformational. People who are able to distinguish between a range of emotions do much, much better at managing the ups and downs of ordinary existence than those who see everything in black and white.” — Susan David
“The limits of your language mean the limits of your world.” — Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Love is the one ‘commodity’ that is not diminished by sharing. In fact, it is increased.” — Alan Jones
“Believing is all a child does for a living.” — Kurtis Lamkin
“Selling Jesus doesn’t pay very well, Lisa … just saying …” Tom S.
“Artists are those of us who still see with the eyes of children.” — Picasso
“Many of life’s failures are made by people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” — Thomas A. Edison
“Wait for someone who loves you differently. One who can see the fire in your soul, the child in your life, and the ocean in your heart.” — Jonathan Muncy Storm
“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” — bell hooks
“Beloved, of course you’re afraid. You are about to be transformed … The goal of a human life is to transform. Not to transform out of a human life but to transform fully into it. Surely you have felt this invitation … “What will it be like on the other side?” Only the architect of your transformation can tell you. I do not know the details of your adventure. I cannot speak to the particular internal conversation of your human life. I don’t know what you will lose. But, I can assure you that if we could pull back the curtain of your adventure, like Dorothy (from the Wizard of Oz) did on hers, what we’d find is that the architect of your transformation is not a malevolent imposter, but is in fact Love itself. The move from Fear to Love is to allow the mysterious unknown before you (aka your life, aka your adventure) to be the way in which you come to know Love. Because to know Love is to be fully human. And Love is constantly orchestrating your homecoming.” — Scott Erickson
“Theological formation is the gradual and painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility. You can be competent in many things, but you cannot be competent in God.” — Henri Nouwen
“Thinking is difficult, that’s why most people judge.” — Carl Jung
“When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.” — bell hooks
“We are made for goodness. We are made for love. We are made for friendliness. We are made for togetherness. We are made for all of the beautiful things that you and I know. We are made to tell the world that there are no outsiders. All are welcome: black, white, red,
yellow, rich, poor, educated, not educated, male, female, gay, straight, all, all, all. We all belong to this family, this human family, God’s family.” — Archbishop Desmond Tutu
“When I run after what I think I want, my days are a furnace of stress and anxiety; if I sit in my own place of patience, what I need flows to me, and without pain. From this I understand that what I want also wants me, is looking for me and attracting me. There is a great secret here for anyone who can grasp it.” — Rumi
“Recognizing the sacred begins when we are interested in every detail of our lives.” — Chogyam Trungpa
“When you notice something clearly and see it vividly, it then becomes sacred.” — Allen Ginsberg
“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and a dream that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us.” — John O’Donohue
“Be more concerned with your character than your reputation because your character is who you really are while your reputation is merely what other think you are.” — John Wooden
“Even after all this time, the Sun never says to the Earth, “You owe me.” Look what happens with a love like that, it lights the whole sky.” — Hafiz
“I will light candles this Christmas: candles of joy despite all sadness, candles of courage where fear is ever present, candles of peace for tempest-tossed days, candles of grace to ease heavy burdens, candles of love to inspire all my living, candles that will burn all the year long.” — Howard Thurman
“Don’t let people pull you into their storm. Pull them into your peace.” — Kimberley Jones
“How beautiful to find a heart that loves you, without asking you for anything, but to be okay.” — Kahlil Gibran
“Be an encourager. The world has plenty of critics already.” — Dave Willis
“We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly.” — Sam Keen
“Peace does not mean the suppression of all differences, but their coexistence and fruitful collaboration. Peace does not consist in one [person], one party, one nation, crushing and dominating everyone else. Peace exists where [people] who have power to be enemies are, instead friends by reason of the sacrifices they have made in order to meet one another on a higher level, where the differences between them are no longer a source of conflict.” — Thomas Merton
“A problem is a chance for you to do your best.” — Duke Ellington
“Magic happens when you don’t give up, even though you want to. The Universe always falls in love with a stubborn heart.” — Jonathan Muncy Storm
“We opened the box we had God in … and all heaven broke loose.” — Robert Cottrell
A preacher and caregiver’s Brief But Spectacular (PBS Newshour, December 8, 2021) take on helping people: https://youtu.be/pWf7tNjpX34 — Rev. Terrell Scruggs
“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too; … If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster, And treat those two impostors just the same; … Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.” — Rudyard Kipling
“We have a chance to evolve beyond the built-in misconceptions that people succeed because they are good or fail because they’re bad. Life is much more complicated than that. By reflectively working through our experiences of both success and failure, we can emerge on the other side with a new, more realistic understanding of ourselves and the world.” — Jennifer Kunst
“You can always tell when the groove is not working.” and “Act your age, not your shoe size” — Prince
“I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in the darkness, the astonishing light of your own being … We are people who need to love, because Love is the soul’s life, Love is simply creation’s greatest joy.” — Hafiz
“By doing the work to love ourselves more, … we will love each other better.” — Laverne Cox
“Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.” and “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to cast a stone.” and “If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” and “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” — Jesus (just a few of my favorites of his)
“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.” — Rumi
“God loves you just the way you are. But, … refuses to leave you that way.” — Max Lucado
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” — Carl Jung
“In this world, hate never yet dispelled hate. Only love dispels hate. This is the law, ancient and inexhaustible.” — Buddha
“Life’s journey is not to arrive at the grave safely in a well-preserved body, but rather to slide in sideways, totally worn out, shouting … Wow! What a ride!” — Hunter S. Thompson
“Our prayer must not be self-centered. It must arise not only because we feel our own need as a burden we must lay upon God, but also because we are so bound up in love for others that we feel their need as acutely as our own. To make intercession for others is the most powerful and practical way in which we can express our love for them.” — John Calvin
“Do your little bits of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” — Desmond Tutu
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung
“You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing which you think you cannot do.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
“Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to [confess] is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long. Of course, the longer we keep our truth hidden, the more difficult it is to give it voice, or so it seems, because while the pressure is building, we are running out of air. But we are never more than a heartbeat from freeing ourselves of that awful isolation, never more than a gulp and a cough from falling back into the open.” — Mark Nepo
“God is subtle, not malicious.” — Albert Einstein
“I have treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half of life – that is to say, over 35 – there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life.” — Carl Jung
The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.” — Walter Brueggemann
“The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.” — Muhammad Ali
“Like every believer I know, my search for real life has led me through at least three distinct seasons of faith, not once or twice, but over and over again. Jesus called them: finding life, losing life, and finding life again, with the paradoxical promise that finders will be losers while those who lose their lives for his sake will wind up finding them again … You do not have to die in order to discover the truth of this teaching … You only need to loose track of who you are, or who you thought you were supposed to be, so that you end up lying flat on the dirt floor basement of your heart. Do this, Jesus says, and you will live.” — Barbara Brown Taylor, in her book, Leaving Church.
“Put the Women in Charge” — Keb Mo https://youtu.be/FciQeRGYFlw
“What you see and hear depends a great deal on where you are standing. It also depends on what sort of person you are.” — C.S. Lewis
“To say Yes to life is at one and the same time to say Yes to yourself.” — Dag Hammarskjold
“It shall be done … sometime, somewhere. It might as well be you.” — Ophelia Guyon Browning
“The mind determines what’s possible. The heart surpasses it.” — Pilar Coolinta
“It takes great courage to grow up to be who you really are.” — E.E. Cummings
“We must learn to regard people less in light of what they do or fail to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“Live long enough to be a problem for your kids” — Ed McShane
“The last few years have taught me to suspend my desire for a conclusion, to assume that nothing is static and that renegotiation will be perpetual, to hope primarily that little truths will keep emerging in time.” — Jia Toleration
“Always be on the lookout for the presence of wonder.” — E.B. White
“May [the] peace bewitch you.” — Michael R.J. Saalman
“There are forces out there that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be a force which is truly for good.” –John Coltrane
“Never place a period where God has placed a comma.” — Gracie Allen
“The more we allow ourselves to unfold, the less likely we are to unravel.” — Rabbi Irwin Kula
“Do not cast away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope.” — Friedrich Nietzsche