I Like Quotes…
I like Vivaldi, Johnny Cash, and the Chain Smokers. I like sushi, baba ganoush and tater-tots. It goes on and on, Napoleon Dynamite, Mad Max and The Shawshank Redemption. I am a person of wide interests. I like lots of things. I’m a generalist not a specialist, more artist than accountant. I’m at peace knowing I will never be an expert.
I’m fond of quotations for the same reason. They offer a wide look. Quotes are sneaky. They slip things under my radar. They are lubricant for a squeaky mind. They open my doors a bit wider without so much creaking. Im grateful for quotations introducing me to new voices who have become friends and mentors.
Here are a few recent favorites. Some make me laugh out loud, some pester me late at night. If something stirs in you, listen and inquire. Ask yourself, why you reacted as you did. Maybe a creaky door will open, maybe you will meet a new friend….
“In this world, you must be a bit too kind to be kind enough.”
~ Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux“
You don’t have to believe your thoughts…. thoughts are real but not necessarily true” ~ Tara Brach
“Experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” ~Randy Pausch
“It is easy enough to be friendly to one’s friends. But to befriend the one who regards himself as your enemy is the quintessence of true religion. The other is mere business.” ~ Gandhi
“Define yourself radically as one beloved by God. This is the true self. Every other identity is illusion.” ~ Brennan Manning
“Pain that is not transformed is transmitted.” ~ Fr. Rohr
“Without somehow destroying me in the process, how could God reveal himself in a way that would leave no room for doubt? If there were no room for doubt, there would be no room for me.” ~ Frederick Buechner
“I’m not the heroic type. I was beaten up by Quakers.” ~ Woody Allen
“Wisdom says we are nothing. Love says we are everything. Between these two our life flows.” ~ Jack Kornfield
“Playing it safe requires that we avoid risky situations—which covers pretty much all of life.” ~ Tara Brach
“I am quite sure I am more afraid of people who are themselves terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.” ~ Teresa of Ávila
“If you do not know your own dignity and condition, you cannot value anything at its proper worth.” ~ Saint Bonaventure
“When someone is counting out gold for you, don’t look at your hands, or the gold. Look at the giver.” ~ Jalaluddin Rumi,
“It isn’t the things that happen to us in our lives that cause us to suffer, it’s how we relate to the things that happen to us that causes us to suffer.” ~ Pema Chödrön
“The less theorizing you do about God, the more receptive you are to His inpouring.” ~ Meister Eckhart
“The people who know God well—mystics, hermits, prayerful people, those who risk everything to find God—always meet a lover, not a dictator.” ~ Fr. Rohr
“The only way to make a man worthy of love is by loving him.” ~ T. Merton
“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? ……. Four.
Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
“Seek the company of those who are still seeking the truth and run away from those who think they have found it.” ~ J. T. O’Hara
“Fearlessness is the first requisite of spirituality. Cowards can never be moral.”
~ M. Gandhi
“Reality always bats last” ~ Anne Lamott
“My life has been filled with terrible misfortunes — most of which never happened.”
~ Mark Twain
“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another… There are just some kind of men who – who’re so busy worrying about the next world they’ve never learned to live in this one…”
~ Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
“God will not look you over for medals, degrees or diplomas but for scars.”
~ E Hubbard
“Sometimes you can see things happen right in front of your eyes and still jump to the wrong conclusions.” ~ Jodi Picoult
“The darker the night, the brighter the stars, The deeper the grief, the closer is God!” ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment
