quotes

A COLLECTION OF PAUSE-WORTHY QUOTES 
(newest additions located first)

C.S. Lewis

The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing to find the place where all the beauty came from. 

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G.K. Chesterton

One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak. 

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Christian Wiman

Let us remember...that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.

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Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Write about your sorrows, your wishes, your passing thoughts, your belief in anything beautiful...

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Thomas Henry Huxley

The great end of life is not knowledge, but action.

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Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

I suggest that the dominant culture, now and in every time, is grossly uncritical, cannot tolerate serious and fundamental criticism, and will go to great lengths to stop it. Conversely, the dominant culture is a wearied culture, nearly unable to be seriously energized to new promises from God. We know, of course, that none of us relishes criticism, but we may also recognize that none of us much relishes energizing either, for that would demand something of us. The task of prophetic ministry is to hold together criticism and energizing, for I should urge that either by itself is not faithful to our best tradition.

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Thich Nhat Hanh, Being Peace

In Buddhism, the most important precept of all is to live in awareness, to know what is going on. To know what is going on, not only here, but there. For instance, when you eat a piece of bread, you may choose to be aware that our farmers, in growing the wheat, use chemical poisons a little too much.... When we eat a piece of meat or drink alcohol, we can produce awareness that 40,000 children die each day from hunger and that in order to produce a piece of meat or a bottle of liquor, we have to use a lot of grain. Eating a bowl of cereal may be more reconciling with the suffering of the world than eating a piece of meat....Every day we do things, we are things, that have to do with peace. If we are aware of our lifestyle, our way of consuming, of looking at things, we will know how to make peace right in the moment we are alive, the present moment.

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Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

Try to discover your true, honest, untheoretical self. Don't think of yourself as an intestinal tract and tangle of nerves in the skull, that will not work unless you drink coffee. Think of yourself as incandescent power, illuminated perhaps and forever talked to by God and his messengers.Remember how wonderful you are, what a miracle! (Think if Tiffany's made a mosquito, how wonderful we would think it was!) If you are never satisfied, that is a good sign. It means your vision can see so far that it is hard to come up to it.Again I say, the only unfortunate people are the glib ones, immediately satisfied with their work. To them the ocean is only knee-deep.... Don't be afraid of yourself.... Don't always be appraising yourself....And why should you do all these things? Because there is nothing that makes people so generous, joyful, lively, bold and compassionate, so indifferent to fighting and the accumulation of objects and money. Because the best way to know the Truth or Beauty is to try to express it.

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Ecclesiastes 9:13 I have also seen this example of wisdom under the sun, and it seemed great to me.  14 There was a little city with few men in it, and a great king came against it and besieged it, building great siegeworks against it.  15 But there was found in it a poor, wise man, and he by his wisdom delivered the city. Yet no one remembered that poor man.  16 But I say that wisdom is better than might, though the poor man’s wisdom is despised and his words are not heard.  17 The words of the wise heard in quiet are better than the shouting of a ruler among fools.  18 Wisdom is better than weapons of war, but one sinner destroys much good.