Concentration

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

Hold to Christ and for the rest be uncommitted.

Herbert Butterfield

Commitment

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

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

(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

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

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