Pugh's Commonplace

Concentration

2011-12-20T04:29:00.001-08:00

One of the busiest of city dentists was once asked how he managed to do his work with such calm efficiency when he knew that the adjoining room was crowded with people awaiting him. His reply was that for him only one patient existed.

Unattributed

Commitment

2011-12-20T04:28:00.000-08:00

Hold to Christ and for the rest be uncommitted.

Herbert Butterfield

Commitment

2011-12-20T04:27:00.000-08:00

Do you really have feelings any longer for anybody or anything except your self – or even that? Without the strength of a personal commitment, your experience of others is most aesthetic etc.

Dag Hammersjkold: Markings

Committees

2011-12-20T04:26:00.000-08:00

I grant you that the 47 men who produced the Authorised Version worked in the main upon Tyndale’s version, taking that for their basis... But when Tyndale has been granted, you have yet to face the miracle that forty seven men – not one of them known outside this performance, for any superlative talent – sat in committee, and almost consistently over a vast extent of work – improved what genius had done. I give you the word of an old committeeman that this is not the
way of committees.

Sir Arthur Quiller Couch: The Art of Writing

Civilisation

2011-12-09T03:41:00.001-08:00

(During the 30 Years War)...The habit of committing atrocities had developed a general taste for atrocities. With cruelty, as with lust, avarice, gluttony and the love of power: l’appetit vien en mangeant. Hence the importance of preserving at any cost the unreasoned tradition of civilised conduct, the social convention of ordinary decency. Destroy these and immediately large numbers of men and women, discovering within themselves no obvious reasons why they should not behave like devils, do behave like devils and go on doing so until such time as they physically destroy themselves, or grow weary of the strain and uncertainty of diabolic life, or else, for whatever providential reason, discover deep in their own souls the hidden springs of compassion, the potential goodness, latent even in the worst of men and by the best, fully actualised in the superhuman splendour of saintliness.

Aldous Huxley: Grey Eminence

Church

2011-12-09T03:40:00.001-08:00

There can be no Word of God without the people of God.

Martin Luther, quoted by The Reverend

Dr. Colin Morris: The Word and the Words

Church

2011-12-09T03:39:00.001-08:00

The Church is nothing but a section of humanity in which Christ has really taken form.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, quoted by J. V. Taylor The Go-between God

Church

2011-12-09T03:38:00.001-08:00

We must say bluntly that when the church ceases to be a mission, then she ceases to have any right to the titles by which she is adorned in the New Testament.

Lesslie Newbigin, quoted by Richard G Jones,
Anthony J Wesson Towards a Radical Church

Church

2011-12-09T03:37:00.001-08:00

St. Augustine, somewhere, has a phrase about the Church of his day, as, like a frost-bound tree, seeming dead, but waiting for the summer. Sacred Trinity had every sign of being dead but waiting for nothing.

Canon Peter Green quoted by Rev. H. E. Sheen

Church

2011-12-09T03:36:00.003-08:00

The Church exists by mission, just as a fire exists by burning.

Emil Brunner

Church

2011-12-09T03:36:00.001-08:00

The Church is her true self only when she exists for humanity.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Church

2011-12-09T03:35:00.001-08:00

The Protestant idea of a church, expressed in the Augsburg Confession, and in very similar terms in the Thirty Nine Articles (nineteenth article) is that the visible church is a congregation of faithful or believing men, “In which the pure Word of God is preached and the sacraments administered according to Christ’s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same. “

Henry Wace: Principles of the Reformation

Church

2011-12-08T03:47:00.001-08:00

Wherever we see the word of God sincerely preached and heard, wherever we see the sacraments administered according to the institution of Christ, there we cannot have any doubt that the Church of God has some existence, since his promise cannot fail, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst.’

Calvin: Institution IV 1.9 quoted by Lesslie Newbigin:
The Household of God

Church

2011-12-08T03:46:00.001-08:00

Wherever you see this word preached, believed, confessed and acted on, do not doubt that there must be a true ecclesia sancta catholica...for God’s word does not go away empty.

Martin Luther quoted by Lesslie Newbigin: The Household of God

Church

2011-12-08T03:45:00.001-08:00

The Church is the fellowship of the dead to themselves and alive for Christ.

Nels Ferré: in Christ and the Christian; quoted by

William Barclay: Plain Man Looks at the Beatitudes

Church

2011-12-08T03:44:00.001-08:00

The Church is not a community of escape. It is a community of expectancy.

Max Warren: The Christian Mission

Church

2011-12-08T03:43:00.001-08:00

‘Sire, it is in truth the lot of the Church of God, in whose name I speak, to suffer blows and not to return them. Yet I also take leave to remind you that she is an anvil which has employed many hammers.’

Addressed by Beza to the King of Navarre after the
massacre of Vassey. J.S. Whale: The Protestant Tradition

Church

2011-12-08T03:41:00.001-08:00

The Church is a siding into which Christianity has been shunted to keep it out of the traffic on the main line. Every now and then the driver of the shunted train tries to get it going again (while his mates sit around drinking) and when he is feeling particularly bold he blows the whistle.

Pierre Ceresole

Church

2011-12-08T03:40:00.001-08:00

The ultimate criterion to distinguish a false or moribund church from a true and living church is the power of Jesus Christ himself.

John Mackay: God’s Order

Christmas

2011-12-06T05:56:00.000-08:00

There is nothing I can give you which you have not; but there is much that, while I cannot give, you can take. No heaven can come to us unless our hearts find rest in it today. No peace lies in the future which is not hidden in the present instant. Take peace. The gloom of this world is but a shadow; behind it, yet within reach, is joy. Take joy and so at this Christmastime I greet you with the prayer that for you day break and the shadows flee away.

Fra Giovanni Giocondo

Christmas

2011-12-06T05:55:00.000-08:00

When God gave music to the world it was not in some theory of counterpoint and harmony; he dressed a song in feathers and sat it on a tree. When God gave love to the world it was not in some thesis on the emotions; He implanted it in a mother’s heart. When God gave Himself to the world it was not in some new piece of theology. He wrapped a babe in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. ‘Let us go, even unto Bethlehem and see this thing which is come to pass.’

Unattributed

Christmas

2011-12-06T05:54:00.001-08:00

Still to the lowly soul,
He doth himself impart,
And for his cradle and his throne,
Chooseth the pure in heart.

John Keble: Blest are the Pure in Heart

Christmas

2011-12-06T05:53:00.001-08:00

The people thronged to Bethlehem
The people came
They came to laugh to talk to stare,
They came to sign the census there;
The people came
I too have come to Bethlehem,
I too have come;
I came a Saviour to adore
Of grace and love he has great store:
I, too, have come.

Dorothy M. Gotch

Christmas

2011-11-29T09:36:00.002-08:00

Bid our peace increase
Thou that madest morn;
Bid oppression cease;
Bid the night be peace,
Bid the day be borne.
As this night was bright,
With thy cradle ray
Very light of light,
From the wild world’s night
To thy perfect day.

Algernon Swinburne

Christmas

2011-11-29T09:36:00.001-08:00

O perfect love, out passing sight,
O love beyond our ken,
Come down through all the world tonight
And heal the hearts of men.

Laurence Housman

Christian Belief

2011-11-29T09:35:00.001-08:00

Scepticism is very often the basis for a doctrine of revelation.

Paul Tillich: History of Christian Thought

Christian Belief

2011-11-29T09:34:00.000-08:00

Christian faith is a risk. But unbelief is no less a risk. It is the risk of missing the best that life can offer. Scepticism may close the door to renovating experience. We may suffer ineffable loss by remaining blind to truths which we lack the daring to apprehend or to goodness and beauty which we are too dull to perceive. Life is a risk every way. It is as we said in the first lecture - decision, commitment, adventure.

J.H. Oldham: Life is Commitment

Christianity

2011-11-28T03:55:00.000-08:00

Christianity is avowedly the most materialistic of all religions... If we allow the spiritual and the physical to become separated, the unity of man’s life is broken; the material world, with all man’s economic activity becomes a happy hunting ground for uncurbed acquisitiveness and religion becomes a refined occupation for the leisure of the mystical. It is in the sacramental view of the universe, both of its material and of its spiritual elements, that there is given hope of making human both politics and economics and of making effectual both faith and love.

William Temple: Nature, Man and God.
Quoted by J. H. Oldham in Life is Commitment

Christianity

2011-11-28T03:54:00.001-08:00

Christianity is not primarily demand but fulfilment.

J. H. Oldam: Life is Commitment

Christianity

2011-11-28T03:53:00.002-08:00

The truth of Christianity cannot be proved to the man in the street till he come off the street by owning its power.

P. T. Forsyth: Cruciality of the Cross.

Christianity

2011-11-28T03:53:00.001-08:00

Christianity is eternity in the midst of time.

Adolf Von Harnack

Christ

2011-11-28T03:52:00.001-08:00

I doubt whether Christ should be brought into the technical details of policy towards Germany, such as dismantling, because I do not pretend to know what his views would have been on this issue.

Lord Vansittart: letter to the Manchester Guardian Autumn 1949

Christ

2011-11-28T03:51:00.000-08:00

...For from the hour of my birth, to my death on the cross; I was not without suffering or grief. I suffered great want of things temporal. I often heard many complaints... etc.

Thomas A Kempis: Imitation of Christ Book 4

Christ

2011-11-28T03:50:00.000-08:00

Real confrontation, decision and action in the areas of modern life which matter at the moment occur where people open themselves to the real issues involved. For the Christian one of the elements in every situation is the living Christ.

John Vincent: Here I Stand

Christ

2011-11-27T12:15:00.000-08:00

He who prayed for the fickle Peter still lives to strengthen us against temptation to keep our faith from failing. The work which Jesus did on earth goes on in the eternal order. He is active now in bringing into the world the fruits of his redeeming love, and his death and resurrection have permanently changed the balance of spiritual forces in the universe.

Gordon S. Wakefield: The Life of the Spirit Today

Christ

2011-11-27T12:11:00.000-08:00

If Christ is a man,
And only a man I say,
That of all mankind I will cleave to him,
And to him I will cleave away.

If Jesus Christ is a God,
And the only God, I swear
I will follow him through heaven and hell
The earth, the sea and the air.

Christ is the stooping down of God, the arm of God on which we can lean; the heart of God of which we can feel the sympathy; the eye of God of which we can bear the glance; the voice of God which is music, melody and peace.

Richard Watson Gilder

Christ

2011-11-27T12:10:00.000-08:00

When we have truly found Christ we can go through the world alone.

Andrew A. Bonar: Heavenly Springs

Christ

2011-11-27T12:09:00.000-08:00

To one of his officers on his island prison: “I am a great failure; but Jesus the carpenter of Nazareth is a world conqueror.”

Napoleon; Dickie: Fellowship of Youth

Christ

2011-11-27T12:07:00.000-08:00

Schweitzer also asserts: “To me, however, Jesus remains what he was. Not for a single minute have I had to struggle for my conviction that in Him is the supreme spiritual and religious authority.”

Albert Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus quoted by
Oldham: Life is Commitment

Christ

2011-11-25T08:38:00.000-08:00

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.

Albert Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus quoted
by Oldham: Life is Commitment

Christ

2011-11-25T08:37:00.000-08:00

Not the historical Jesus but the spirit which goes forth from him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world.

Albert Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Christ

2011-11-25T08:36:00.000-08:00

Anyone who ventures to look the historical Jesus straight in the face and to listen for what he has to teach him in his powerful sayings, soon ceases to ask what this strange seeming Jesus can still be to him. He learns to know him as one who claims authority over him.

Albert Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Christ

2011-11-25T08:30:00.002-08:00

He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship.

Albert Schweitzer: The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Cheerfulness

2011-11-25T08:30:00.001-08:00

Constant cheerfulness is the sure sign of a wise mind.

Montaigne

Charity

2011-11-25T08:29:00.000-08:00

It is for your love alone that men will pardon you for the bread you give to them.

St. Vincent de Paul to his novices. Quoted in
Congregational Prayer Fellowship Handbook 1971

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:07:00.001-08:00

H. H. Kramer quotes a saying of J. C. Blumhardt: “Every Christian needs two conversions: first to Christ and then to the world”.

Reverend Daniel Jenkins: Beyond Religion

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:06:00.000-08:00

I think it is a very poor kind of holiness that does not make us care for others.

Andrew Bonar: Heavenly Springs

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:05:00.000-08:00

A believer is not very holy if he is not very kind.

Andrew Bonar: Heavenly Springs

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:04:00.000-08:00

Robinson wrote to Bolivar. “Only understand that to make a new republic one must first make a new people.”

Samuel Robinson attributed by J. B. Trend: Bolivar and the
Independence of Spanish America

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:03:00.000-08:00

“I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that he had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.” Wesley at once began to pray earnestly for his enemies and publicly testified to all present what he now felt.

John Wesley; quoted by John Telford, Life of John Wesley

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

The only conceivable way of bringing about a reconstruction of our world is first of all to become new men under the old circumstances.

Albert Schweitzer

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:01:00.000-08:00

Society can never be greatly improved until such time as most of its members choose to become theocentric saints.

Aldous Huxley: Grey Eminence

Changed Life

2011-11-24T03:00:00.000-08:00

For the radical and permanent transformation of personality only one effective method has been discovered – that of the mystics. It is a difficult method demanding from those who undertake it a great deal more patience, resolution, self-abnegation and awareness than most people are prepared to give.

Aldous Huxley: Grey Eminence

Change

2011-11-22T13:15:00.000-08:00

Change is the nursery of music, joy, life, and eternity. Great dividing line in Europe, in fact in the entire world, is not the line between right and left. All of us who grew up in the intellectual atmosphere of the twenties were sincerely convinced that people who were politically to the left of the middle acted under a moral incentive. Indeed, as I have said, in most radicals there had been during the early post-war period, underneath it all, a love of justice and a compassion for the multitude. Conversely, it was held that people were conservative out of material motives for conservatism. No matter how much some of them were able to deceive themselves in this respect, the Nazi years taught us a lesson. It happened, not infrequently, that you met a friend whom you had known for years as a “staunch liberal” and he turned out to be eagerly ready for any compromise that would save his skin. On the other hand, we saw people whom we had disdained as reactionaries go to the concentration camps and to the gallows. In the beginning it seemed confusing. But gradually it became clearer, and it was obvious that the only thing that counts in this world is the strength of moral conviction.

Karl Stern: The Pillar of Fire

Call of God

2011-11-22T13:13:00.000-08:00

Marmaduke Stevenson: “In the beginning of the year 1653, I was at the plough in the East part of Old England near the place where my outward being was and as I walked after the plough I was filled with the love and presence of the living God, which did ravish my heart when I felt it, for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream, so did the life and love of God run through me like precious ointment giving a pleasant smell which made me to stand still. And as I stood a little still, with my heart and mind stayed upon the Lord, the word of the Lord came to me in a still small voice, which I did hear perfectly saying to me in the secret of my heart and conscience, “I have ordained thee a prophet unto the nations” and at the hearing of the word of the Lord I was put to a stand, seeing that I was but a child for such a weighty matter.” But since disobedience was out of the question, Marmaduke Stevenson put aside his plough and sailed for the Barbadoes, eventually reaching Massachusetts where he paid for his faith with his life.

Florence Higham: Faith of our Fathers

Books

2011-11-18T02:55:00.000-08:00

A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life.

John Milton: Areopagitica

Bible

2011-11-18T02:54:00.002-08:00

The Bible is the greatest sermon in the world.

P.T. Forsyth: Positive Preaching and the Modern World
(See entry on Tolstoy under Inspiration)

Bible

2011-11-18T02:54:00.001-08:00

The words of St Paul are not dead words; they are living creatures and have hands and feet.

Martin Luther: quoted in Ways: Letters of St. Paul

Bible

2011-11-18T02:53:00.001-08:00

The Word did it all, I left it to the Word.

Martin Luther

Bible

2011-11-18T02:52:00.002-08:00

I stand with the Quaker, John Woolman, in believing that there is more light waiting to break out of His word.

John J. Vincent

Bible

2011-11-18T02:52:00.001-08:00

I will spread out before thee the pleasant fields of Holy Scripture, that with an enlarged heart thou mayest begin to run the way of my commandments.

Thomas A Kempis

Bible

2011-11-18T02:51:00.000-08:00

Holy scripture is a sweet scented herb and the more you rub it the more it emits its fragrance.

Martin Luther

Bible

2011-11-17T05:24:00.000-08:00

Professor T.H. Huxley had such men in mind in his great panegyric on the Bible, when, after bidding us consider that, “This book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history”, he concludes, “And finally that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village, to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other civilisations in the world, and of a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest nations in the world. By the study of what other book could children be so humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession, fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the intervals between two eternities, and earns the blessings or the curses of all time according to its efforts to do good and hate evil, even as they are also earning their payment for their work.

T. H. Huxley Collected Essays Volume 3, Science and Education,
quoted by Victor Murray, Education into Religion

Bible

2011-11-17T05:19:00.000-08:00

Whereof one day, when I was in a meeting of God’s people, full of sadness and terror (for my fears again were strong upon me) and as I was now thinking, my soul was never the better, but my case most sad and fearful, these words did with great power suddenly break in on me: my grace is sufficient for thee, my grace is sufficient for thee, my grace is sufficient for thee, three times together and oh, methought that every word was a mighty word unto me, as “my” and “grace” and “sufficient” and “for thee”. They were then and sometimes still are far bigger than others be.

John Bunyan: Grace Abounding

Bible

2011-11-17T05:18:00.000-08:00

I have found words for my inmost thoughts, songs for my joy, utterances for my hidden griefs, and pleadings for my shame and feebleness.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit.

Bible

2011-11-16T07:39:00.000-08:00

Before, as I walked about on my hunting, or for viewing the country, the anguish of my soul at my condition would break out upon me on a sudden, and my very heart would die within me to think of the woods, the mountains, the deserts I was in; and how I was a prisoner locked up with the eternal bars and bolts of the ocean, in an uninhabited wilderness, without redemption.

But I began to exercise myself with new thoughts. I daily read the Word of God, and applied all the comforts of it to my present state. One morning, being very sad, I opened the Bible on these words, “I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee!” Immediately it occurred to me that these words were to me. Why else should they be directed in such a manner, just at the moment when I was mourning over my condition, as one forsaken of God and Man? “Well then,” said I, “If God does not forsake me, of what ill consequence can it be, or what matters it that the world should all forsake me, seeing, on the other hand, if I had all the world and should lose the favour and blessing of God, there would be no comparison in the loss?”

I never opened my Bible or shut it, but my very soul within me blessed God for directing my friend in England, without any order of mine, to pack it among my goods, and for assisting me afterwards to save it out of the wreck of the ship.

Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe

Belief

2011-11-16T07:38:00.002-08:00

Belief is no adequate substitute for inner experience, and where this is absent even a strong faith which comes miraculously as a gift of grace may depart equally miraculously. People call faith the true religious experience but they do not stop to think that actually it is a secondary phenomenon arising from the fact that something happened to us in the first place which instilled ‘piotos’ into us – that is, trust and loyalty etc.

Carl Jung: The Undiscovered Self

Belief

2011-11-16T07:38:00.001-08:00

To believe means to endure tension questions unsolved.

John Henry Newman, quoted by Ida Gorres

Belief

2011-11-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief in denying them.

Emerson

Belief

2011-11-16T07:36:00.000-08:00

It is in the light of our beliefs about the ultimate nature of reality that we formulate our conception of right and wrong; and it is in the light of our conceptions of right and wrong that we frame our conduct, not only in the relations of private life, but also in the sphere of politics and
economics.

Aldous Huxley: Ends and Means

Beauty

2011-11-15T10:04:00.000-08:00

For he who would proceed aright in this manner should begin in youth to visit beautiful forms; and first, if he be guided by his instructor aright, to love one such form only – out of that he should create fair thoughts; and soon he will of himself perceive that the beauty of one form is akin to the beauty of another and that beauty in every form is one and the same.

Plato; quoted by Rollo May in The Courage to Create

Beauty

2011-11-15T10:03:00.001-08:00

The beautiful is that kind of good in which the soul rests without possession.

St. Thomas Aquinas; quoted by
Paul Tillich: History of Christian Thought

Beauty

2011-11-15T09:59:00.000-08:00

Charles Kingsley, in his last illness, was overheard saying to himself:

“How beautiful God is.
I love all beauteous things,
I seek and adore them.
God hath no better praise
And man in his hasty days
Is honoured for them.”

Robert Bridges

Beauty

2011-11-15T09:58:00.002-08:00

If I give you a rose, you cannot doubt God any more.

Tertullian

Beauty

2011-11-15T09:58:00.001-08:00

Beauty, so old, so new. Too late I love thee.

St. Augustine

Beauty

2011-11-15T09:57:00.000-08:00

Beauty is a token fallen from Heaven to Earth in order to remind us of the ideal world.

Henri Frederic Amiel: Journal

Beauty

2011-11-15T09:55:00.000-08:00

I heard a hospital chairman say: ‘I’ve seen a patient’s life on the wobble, when bacteriology could do no more, and help came from a bowl of roses,’ That bowl of roses was symbolic. It represented those tender graces, those healing kindnesses, which mean so much to those that are ill and in pain.

Philip Inman: No Going Back

Beauty

2011-11-11T02:39:00.000-08:00

One becomes amazingly receptive after two years' dearth of the pure elements of Earth. What it means to have around the hills and meadows, fields and forests, after prison grills and walls; the scent of flowers instead of smoke and steam from damp clothing; bird chorus instead of the grind of machinery day and night – that cannot be put into words.

From pamphlet In Prison - Yet Free by Eva Herman,
a Quaker imprisoned 1943-45 by Nazis for befriending Jews.

Beauty

2011-11-11T02:38:00.000-08:00

Never lose an opportunity to see anything beautiful. Beauty is God’s handwriting.

Charles Kingsley

Beauty

2011-11-11T02:37:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

Wordsworth: Intimations of Immortality

Beauty

2011-11-11T02:36:00.000-08:00

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams and health and quiet dreaming.

Keats: Endymion

Beauty

2011-11-11T02:35:00.000-08:00

Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all
Ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Keats: Ode on a Grecian Urn

Backsliding

2011-11-11T02:33:00.000-08:00

'Twas hard work, I say, to offer to look him in the face against whom I had so vilely sinned! And indeed I have found it as difficult to come to God by prayer after backsliding from him as to do any other thing.

John Bunyan: Grace Abounding

Awareness

2011-11-10T02:18:00.000-08:00

I wish to make people aware so they do not squander and dissipate their lives! The aristocrats assume that there is always a mass of men lost. But they hide the fact, they live withdrawn and behave as though these many, many men did not exist. That is what is Godless in the superiority of the aristocrats; in order to have things their own way they do not even make people aware.

Unattributed

Awareness

2011-11-10T02:17:00.000-08:00

The Father has put us into the world not to walk through it with lowered eyes, but to search for him through things, events, people. Everything must reveal God to us.

Abbe Michel Quoist: Prayers of Life

Awareness

2011-11-10T02:16:00.000-08:00

Which only shows, yet once more, how right the Buddha was in classing unawareness and stupidity among the deadly sins.

Aldous Huxley: Ends and Means

Atonement

2011-11-10T02:15:00.000-08:00

What is the atonement of Christ? It is himself. It is the inherent everlasting mercy of God made apparent to human eyes and ears. The everlasting love was found in our Lord’s life and death. It shows that God forgives because he loves to forgive. He works by smiles if possible; if not by frowns. Pain is only a means of enforcing love.

David Livingstone; quoted by
C.F. Andrews in Christ in the Silence

Assurance

2011-11-09T08:16:00.000-08:00

What a happiness, what a joy it is to be quite sure that there is a God. Not anything built up by mere human reasoning, no clever or subtle hypothesis, nothing particularly French or German or English but something as infinitely more real than the air around us, and the pollen of flowers, and the flight of the birds, and the trials and troubles and the needs of our little lives stimulated and enriched by the lives of creatures so different from ourselves, touching us continually all round; and the fundamental assurance is not simply one of variety or even of richness. It is an assurance accompanying and crowning all such sense of variety, of a reality, of the reality, one and harmonious, strong and self sufficing, of God.

Baron Friedrich Von Hugel: the last paragraph dictated
for his unfinished book,The Reality of God

Art

2011-11-09T08:13:00.000-08:00

There is as much healing power in a Beethoven sonata or a painting by Constable as in the excerpts found in the Bible.

G. B. Shaw: Days with Bernard Shaw

Anxiety

2011-11-09T08:12:00.000-08:00

Never bear more than one trouble at a time; some bear three kinds – all they have ever had, all they have now, and all they expect to have.

Lord Avebury

Anxiety

2011-11-09T08:09:00.000-08:00

He (Dr Brocklesby) mentioned a respectable gentleman who became extremely penurious near the close of his life. Johnson said, “There must have been a degree of madness about him.” “Not at all, Sir, (said Dr. B) his judgement was entire. Unluckily, however, he mentioned that although he had a fortune of £27,000, he denied himself many comforts from an apprehension he could not afford them.”

James Boswell: The Life of Samuel Johnson

Anxiety

2011-11-08T07:22:00.000-08:00

Anxiety, the spice of life...
Professor Arnold Toynbee in a lecture at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, said that the world had “no moral claim” to enjoy political and economic stability. “Anxiety, insecurity and danger are normal conditions of human life,” he said. “Do not dread or resent the insecurity that has overtaken the middle classes in the United States and other English speaking nations. On the contrary, welcome it as an adventure.”

Professor Arnold Toynbee
Associated Press cutting.

Adventure

2011-11-08T07:12:00.000-08:00

The things that haven’t been done before
Are the things worthwhile today.
Are you one of the flock that follows or
Are you one that shall lead the way?
Are you one of the timid souls that quail
At the jeers of the doubting crew,
Or dare you, whether you win or fail,
Strike out for the path that’s new?

Edgar Guest: The Things That Haven't Been Done Before

Acceptance

2011-11-08T07:06:00.000-08:00

Friday: In Dag Hammarskjold’s Markings there are two entries apropos of the above. In the spring of the year he died he wrote, “I don’t know who – or what - put the question. I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remembering answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone - or Something – and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal.” The other is this: “God does not die on the day we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.”

Dag Hammarskjold: Markings quoted in
the Bolton Weekly 17th June 1965

Acceptance

2011-11-08T06:57:00.001-08:00

We experience moments in which we accept ourselves, because we feel that we have been accepted by that which is greater than we have. If only more such moments were given to us! For it is such moments that make us love our life, that make us accept ourselves, not in our goodness and self-complacency, but in our certainty of the inner meaning of life.

Paul Tillich: Shaking the Foundations

Acceptance

2011-11-08T06:56:00.000-08:00

It was not until he was middle-aged that he (Robert Lynd) could accept presents without actual discourtesy.

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