“My life is a story about who God is and what He does in a human heart.”
—Shauna Niequist, Bittersweet
July 2012
84 posts
“When you are inspired by some great purpose, some extraordinary project, all your thoughts break their bonds; Your mind transcends limitations, your consciousness expands in every direction, and you find yourself in a new, great and wonderful world. Dormant forces, faculties and talents become alive, and you discover yourself to be a greater person by far than you ever dreamed yourself to be.”
—Pitanjali
“I’m going to make everything around me beautiful. That will be my life.”
—Elise Wolfe
“Following your bliss is not self-indulgent, but vital; your whole physical system knows that this is the way to be alive in this world and the way to give to the world the very best that you have to offer. There IS a track just waiting for each of us and once on it, doors will open that were not open before and would not open for anyone else.”
—Joseph Campbell
“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet”
—Frederick Buechner
“Books are, let’s face it, better than everything else. If we played Cultural Fantasy Boxing League, and made books go fifteen rounds in the ring against the best that any other art form had to offer, then books would win pretty much every time.”
—Nick Hornby, The Polysyllabic Spree
“I love her and it is the beginning of everything.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Life becomes easier when you learn to accept an apology you never got.”
—Robert Brault
“If it were possible for us to see further than our knowledge extends and out a little over the outworks of our surmising, perhaps we should then bear our sorrows with greater confidence than our joys. For they are the moments when something new, something unknown, has entered us.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“Accept whatever comes to you woven in the pattern of your destiny, for what could more aptly fit your needs?”
—Marcus Aurelius
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”
— Melody Beattie
“We are all faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as impossible situations.”
—Charles Swindoll
“She could never go back and make some of the details pretty. All she could do was move forward and make the whole beautiful.”
—Terri St. Cloud
“Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside them was superior to circumstance.”
—Bruce Barton
“It takes courage…to endure the sharp pains of self discovery rather than choose to take the dull pain of unconsciousness that would last the rest of our lives.”
—Marianne Williamson, Return to Love
“I love this world because it is imperfect. It is imperfect, and that’s why it is growing; if it was perfect it would have been dead. Growth is possible only if there is imperfection. I would like you to remember again and again, I am imperfect, the whole universe is imperfect, and to love this imperfection, to rejoice in this imperfection is my whole message.”
—Osho
“As I have not worried to be born, I do not worry to die.”
—Federico García Lorca
“Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.”
—Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
“So you must not be frightened… when a sorrow rises up before you, greater than you have ever seen before; when a restlessness like light and cloud shadows passes over your hands and over all your doing. You must think that something is happening upon you, that life has not forgotten you, that it holds you in its hand; it will not let you fall.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
“I’ve often thought there ought to be a manual to hand to little kids, telling them what kind of planet they’re on, why they don’t fall off it, how much time they’ve probably got here, how to avoid poison ivy, and so on. I tried to write one once. It was called Welcome to Earth. But I got stuck on explaining why we don’t fall off the planet. Gravity is just a word. It doesn’t explain anything. If I could get past gravity, I’d tell them how we reproduce, how long we’ve been here, apparently, and a little bit about evolution. I didn’t learn until I was in college about all the other cultures, and I should have learned that in the first grade. A first grader should understand that his or her culture isn’t a rational invention; that there are thousands of other cultures and they all work pretty well; that all cultures function on faith rather than truth; that there are lots of alternatives to our own society. Cultural relativity is defensible and attractive. It’s also a source of hope. It means we don’t have to continue this way if we don’t like it.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
