People

"When we begin to view people as ideology-carriers rather than human beings, we begin to travel a dark road."

John Ortberg (from his Blog - January 2011)

The questioning friend

My friend is the person who asks the same questions as I (not necessarily the person who arrives at the same conclusions).

C. S. Lewis

Touching people's hearts

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Maya Angelou

Shaped and Fashioned

"We are shaped and fashioned by what we love."

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Beauty

"Beauty is not a luxury. It ennobles our hearts so we can see infinity within ourselves."

-John O'Donohue

Poem/Prayer dealing with Loss

And when your eyes freeze behind the gray window and the ghost of loss gets in to you, may a flock of colors, indigo, red, green and azure blue come to awaken in you a meadow of delight.

John O'Donohue

Why hate is not the worst thing in the world, there is something worse

The true opposite of love is not hate but indifference. Hate, bad as it is, at least treats the neighbour as a thou, whereas indifference turns the neighbour into an it, a thing. This is why we may say that there is actually one thing worse than evil itself and that is indifference to evil. In human relations the nadir of morality, the lowest point as far as Christian ethics is concerned, is manifest in the phrase, I couldn't care less.'
- Joseph Fletcher

Hate is not the opposite of love; apathy is.
- Rollo May

There is nothing harder than the softness of indifference.

- Juan Montalvo

History

"The only thing that history has taught us is that men learn nothing from it."

Hegel

It takes time and work to be succinct

I made this letter longer than usual because I lack the time to make it short. 
- Blaise Pascal

Place in you never wounded

Your identity is not equivalent to your biography.

There is a place in you where you have never been wounded,

where there is still a sureness in you,

where there is a seamlessness in you,

and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you.

And I think the intention of prayer, and spirituality and Love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary

John O'Donohue

Beauty

Perhaps it is beauty that will save us in the end

Dostoyevski

A Quiet Man

When a quiet man is moved to passion, it seems the very earth will shake.




Stephanie Barron, Jane and the Unpleasantness at Scargrave Manor, 1996

Friends and Dreams

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

-Henry David Thoreau

Beauty

“Exuberance is beauty”

William Blake

Love & Kindness

"Life is short and we never have enough time for the hearts of those who travel the way with us. O, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind."

Henri-Frederic Amiel

Rita Rudner on Poodles

"I wonder if other dogs think poodles are members of a weird religious cult."

Rita Rudner

The mystery that is beauty

Beauty is not only a terrible thing, it is also a mysterious thing.
There God and the Devil strive for mastery,
and the battleground is the hearts of men.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Thoreau's view of lakes

“A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

Walden, ‘The Ponds’

Creation is beautiful but corrupted

“Man…trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law –Tho’
Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrek’d against his creed/”

Tennyson, In Memoriam

No good goal is ever lost

Each Life Converges To Some Centre by Emily Dickinson.

Each life converges to some centre
Expressed or still;
Exists in every human nature
A goal,

Admitted scarcely to itself,
it may be,
Too fair
For credibility' s temerity
To dare.

Adored with caution, as a brittle heaven,
To reach
Were hopeless as the rainbow's raiment
To touch,

Yet persevered toward, surer for the distance;
How high
Unto the saints' slow diligence
The sky!

Ungained, it may be, by a life's low venture,
But then,
Eternity enables the endeavoring
Again.