Category Archives: Quotes

Spring

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With winter coming, why not a few words about spring?!

Courtesy of Parker Palmer:

“I will wax romantic about spring and its splendors in a moment, but first there is a hard truth to be told: before spring becomes beautiful, it is plug ugly, nothing but mud and muck.  I have walked in the early spring through fields that will suck your boots off, a world so wet and woeful it makes you yearn for the return of ice.  But in that muddy mess, the conditions for rebirth are being created.

I love the fact that the word humus–the decayed vegetable matter that feeds the roots of plants–comes from the same root that gives rise to the word humility.  It is a blessed etymology.  It helps me understand that the humiliating events of life, the events that leave ‘mud on my face’ or that ‘make my name mud,’ may create the fertile soil in which something new can grow.”

 

Gratitude

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On the theme of Thanksgiving, here are a handful of gratitude-centered quotes I found…

  • The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts.  No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.  ~H.U. Westermayer
  • If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, “thank you,” that would suffice.  ~Meister Eckhart
  • There is no such thing as gratitude unexpressed.  If it is unexpressed, it is plain, old-fashioned ingratitude.  ~Robert Brault
  • When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time.  Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?  ~G.K. Chesterton
  • I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.  ~G.K. Chesterton
  • You say grace before meals.  All right.  But I say grace before the concert and the opera, and grace before the play and pantomime, and grace before I open a book, and grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing and grace before I dip the pen in the ink.  ~G.K. Chesterton
  • If a fellow isn’t thankful for what he’s got, he isn’t likely to be thankful for what he’s going to get.  ~Frank A. Clark
  • The unthankful heart… discovers no mercies; but let the thankful heart sweep through the day and, as the magnet finds the iron, so it will find, in every hour, some heavenly blessings!  ~Henry Ward Beecher
  • I feel a very unusual sensation – if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude.  ~Benjamin Disraeli
  • There is no greater difference between men than between grateful and ungrateful people.  ~R.H. Blyth
  • Who does not thank for little will not thank for much.  ~Estonian Proverb
  • Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.  ~Aldous Huxley
  • When eating bamboo sprouts, remember the man who planted them.  ~Chinese Proverb
  • Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.  ~William Arthur Ward
  • Hem your blessings with thankfulness so they don’t unravel.  ~Author Unknown

Any words there you’re thankful for?

G.K. Chesterton

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If you’re a fan of memorable quotes, then you’ve likely come across G.K. Chesterton.  Few writers have had more fun putting their words together for others to chew on.

Here are a couple I stumbled upon recently…

“Truth is stranger than fiction because we create fiction to suit our fancy.”

“Men do not differ so much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they call excusable.”

Battles

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A quote from Sheldon Kopp:

“All of the significant battles are waged within the self.”

True?  False?

I pray that whatever battlefield you’re on these days, you’re not there alone.

Why Pray?

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If we can slow ourselves and quiet ourselves, these words may speak into that question:

“It is through prayer… that one will be given the most powerful light to see God and self.” (Angela of Foligno)

Reflecting on her years in monastic life with its prayerful patterns that she didn’t always value, Joan Chittister adds this word:

“It took years of repetition, years of chant strung high as a wire, years of recitation droned into space for me to realize that like water on a rock, the words were melting into my soul, etching furrows in my mind, turning me into themselves, disappearing into the whispers of my heart.  Prayer, the regular discipline of resting in God, had become a way of life.”

Later, I found this, in response to Angela of Foligno’s quote:

“When we turn God into a vending machine, when we pray to ‘get’ things rather than to get God–there is no ‘enlightenment’ in that.  When prayer is a journey into the mind and heart of God, into the nature of life, into the shaping of a holy heart, then it is necessarily enlightening.  We come to understand ourselves: our fears, our darkness, our struggles, our resistance.  Then we are faced with choice.  That is enlightenment.”

Then a final section spoke of one other danger in prayer, that we might try to use it as an escape from life.  This was addressed swiftly:

“If prayer becomes the way we give ourselves permission to escape life around us, it is not prayer.  It is some kind of self-induced hypnotism, at best.  Real prayer plunges us into life, red and raw.  It gives us new eyes.  It shapes a new heart within us.  It makes demands on us.  It requires that we become the hands of the God we say we have found.”

And that is plenty for today.