"The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust"

- T. S. Eliot, Choruses From The Rock

Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent, and God is shining through it all the time. That is not just fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows Himself everywhere, in everything--in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without Him. It's impossible. The only thing is is that we don't see it.

God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just no good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

"God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

"We have too many men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount . . . . The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living."

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

"In a world of fugitives, a person taking the opposite direction will appear to run away."

"The maturity of man: to have regained the seriousness he had as a child at play."

"Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true."

"Our passions are not too strong, they are too weak...we are far too easily pleased,"

"Foolishly held consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

"The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be ignited."

"Wisdom is only gained in two ways, and well gained only through both: a study of human nature through history, the actions of men in the past and the best that they have written and thought, and a study through observation and experience of the men and women about us as we live."

"The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason."

"...and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

"What is truth?"

"I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life."

"To think is easy. To act is hard. But the hardest thing in the world is to act in accordance with your thinking."

"Materialists and madmen never have doubts."

"Purity of heart is to will one thing."

"Lord, make me an instrument of your love,
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy;
O Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
To be understood, as to understand;
To be loved, as to love;


For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life."

- St. Francis of Assisi

"Truth: the most deadly weapon ever discovered by humanity. Capable of destroying entire perceptual sets, cultures, and realities. Outlawed by all governments everywhere. Possession is normally punishable by death."

"Thou hast power over the word until it is spoken; then it has power over thee."

"How do you measure success?
To laugh often and much;
To win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children;


To earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
To appreciate beauty;
To find the best in others;
To leave the world a bit better
whether by a healthy child,
a redeemed social condition,
or a job well done;


To know even one other life has breathed
because you lived --
this is to have succeeded."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Lord of reality, make me real
not plastic, synthetic, pretend phony,
an actor playing out his part - hypocrite.
I don't want to keep a prayer list - but to pray
nor agonize to find Your will
- but to obey what I already know

To argue theories of inspiration
- but to submit to Your Word.
I don't want to explain the difference
between eros and philos and agape - but to love.
I don't want to sing as if I mean it - I want to mean it.

I don't want to tell it like it is - but to

be it like You want it.
I don't want to think another needs me
- but I need him else I'm not complete.
I don't want to tell others how to do it - but to do it;
to have to be always right - but to admit it when I'm wrong.
I don't want to be a census taker - but an obstetrician
nor an involved person, a professional - but a friend.
I don't want to be insensitive - but
to hurt where other people hurt
nor to say I know how you feel - but to say God knows
and I'll try if you'll be patient with me
and meanwhile I'll be quiet.
I don't want to scorn the clichés of others
- but to mean everything I say
including this."
- Joe Bayly, "Psalm of Single-mindedness", "Psalms of My Life"

"To laugh is to risk appearing the fool
To weep is to risk appearing sentimental
To reach out for another is to risk involvement
To expose feelings is to risk exposing your true self
To love is to risk not being loved in return
To hope is to risk despair
To try is to risk failure."
- Charles R. Swindoll, "The Quest For Character"

"The poet only asks to get his head in to the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits."

"To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken, it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable . . . . The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers . . . of love is Hell."

"A person who has a why can live with almost any how."

"God is more concerned about our character than our comfort. His goal is not to pamper us physically but to perfect us spiritually."

"If all the world were Christian, it might not matter if all the world were uneducated. But, as it is, a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not. To be ignorant and simple now - not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground - would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen.

"Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered. The cool intellect must work not only against cool intellect on the other side, but against the muddy heathen mysticisms which deny intellect altogether. Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past . . .the learned life thus is, for some, a duty."

"What does not kill me, only makes me stronger."

"Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried."

"But when once the Christ had come, as the Son over His own house, and with His perfect Gospel, nothing remained but to gather in His saints. No higher priest could come, no truer doctrine. The Light and Life of men had appeared, and had suffered, and risen again; and nothing more was left to do. Earth had had its most solemn event, and seen its most august sight; and therefore it was the last time. And hence, though time intervenes between Christ's first and second coming, it is not recognized (as one may say) in the Gospel scheme, but is as it were, an accident. For so it was, that up to Christ's coming in the flesh, the course of things ran straight towards that end, nearing it by every step; but now, under the Gospel, that course has (if I may so speak) altered its direction, as regards His second coming, and runs, not towards the end, but along it, and on the brink of it; and is at all times equally near that great event, which, did it run towards, it would at once run into. Christ, then, is ever at our doors; as near eighteen hundred years ago as now, and not nearer now than then; and not nearer when He comes than now. When He says that He will come soon, "soon" is not a word of time, but of natural order. This present state of things, "the present distress" as St. Paul calls it, is ever close upon the next world, and resolves itself into it. As when a man is given over, he may die any moment, yet lingers; as an implement of way may any moment explode, and must at some time; as we listen for a clock to strike, and at length it surprises us; as a crumbling arch hangs, we know not how, and is not safe to pass under; so creeps on this feeble weary world, and one day, before we know where we are, it will end."

"We do not know what will come, but we know who will come. And if the last hour belongs to us, we do not need to fear the next minute."

"Of the seven deadly sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontation still to come, to savor the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back - in many ways a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton of the feast is you."

"If war is ever justified, then peace is sometimes evil."

"Someone has to do something and it is just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us."

"The truth can change a man in the wisdom of his days
And whisper soft, but constantly, 'You cannot live this way
For deceitful words are costly - and actions even worse;
The abuse that has been suffered here,
From childhood laid its course'

"We witness not a fallen world - but falling every day
And nature joins our great descent with quakes and hurricanes
But I'll meet you on the stormy sea and hold the winds at bay
We'll pull the oars inside the boat and gently drift away


"Now once I spoke in riddles but now I speak it plain
The tears of God are pouring down in remembrance of that day
So let the children fly and question all they see
They'll grow up wise and penetrate the life that lives unseen"

- Michael Been, "When"

"Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so."

"One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important."

"The graveyards are full of indispensable men."

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

"Being unable to cure death, wretchedness and ignorance, men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things."

"If a human life is not to be lived altogether unworthily like that of an animal, which never lifts up its head; if it is not to be trifled away, emptily occupied with what, as long as it lasts, is vanity and when it is over is nothing, or busily occupied with what does indeed make a noise at the moment but has no echo in eternity; if a human life is not be loafed away in inactivity or wasted away in busy activity--then there must be something higher that draws it."

"What a piece of work is a man!
how noble in reason!
how infinite in faculty!
in form and moving how express and admirable!
in action how like an angel!
in apprehension how like a god!
the beauty of the world!
the paragon of animals!
And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?
man delights not me:
no, nor woman neither,
though by your smiling you seem to say so."
- Hamlet in "Hamlet", Act II, Scene II

"In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely "First Servant." All the characters around him - Regan, Cornwall, and Edmund-have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such delusions. He has no notion how the play is going to go. But he understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it. His sword is out and pointed at his master's breast in a moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part: eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted."

"On the whole, more people are cheated by believing in nothing than by believing too much."