Forget what hurt you in the past, but never forget what it taught you. However, if it taught you to hold onto grudges, seek revenge, not forgive or show compassion, to categorize people as good or bad, to distrust and be guarded with your feelings th...
Who gets to be the judge of reality? If it was deeply felt, believed, spoken about often or altered your life course, then it was real enough. Faith doesn't get the luxury of all those things one hundred percent of the time, but we call that normal b...
He said, "When you have been thrown out of Eden you find yourself lacking the one thing that is supposed to make your life worth living..." I understood the philosophy of his point—life is sustained beyond the “throws of love ballets and magic mo...
My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I c...
As it recurred again and again, it set me thinking of what my architect's books say about the custom in early times to consecrate the choir as soon as it was built, and that the nave, being finished sometimes half a century later, often did not get a...
Lost opportunities, lost possibilities, feelings we can never get back. That's part of what it means to be alive. But inside our heads - at least that's where I imagine it - there's a little room where we store those memories. A room like the stacks ...
...After all, the chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of the opinion that the great majority of people will always find...
Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension. On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blin...
Centering our thoughts on God begins with what I like to call discovery. That is, when we discover a great truth about God, we begin to meditate on that truth until it captivates our whole thinking process. That in turn will lead to worship. If worsh...
Another thing I've been trying to do on my walks is to know what I'm looking at, when I'm looking at it. I want to be smart. When I walk down the sidewalk I see about a hundred different kinds of bugs and all I do is point at them like a caveman and ...
At that instant a dazzling claw of lightning streaked down the length of the sky. The hedge and the distant trees seemed to leap forward in the brilliance of the flash. Immediately upon it came the thunder: a high, tearing noise, as though some huge ...
So, take the idea of "rights" and drip some acid on it. Even the most adult of the Ancients knew: the source of a right is power, a right is a function of power. Take two trays of a weighing scale: put a gram on one, and on the other, put a ton. On o...
My interest in Sufism began when I was a college student. At the time, I was a rebellious young woman who liked to wrap several shawls of ‘-isms’ around her shoulders: I was a leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist, anarcho-pacifist…I wa...
Answers I kept my answers small and kept them near; Big questions bruised my mind but still I let Small answers be a bullwark to my fear. The huge abstractions I kept from the light; Small things I handled and caressed and loved. I let the stars assu...
She was very fond of thinking and getting at the truth of things, but was so far from being pedantic, so full of youthful ways that from the first moment one began to love all these originalities in her, and to accept them. [...] This naive combinati...
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist. So, for a time, if such a passion come to fruition, the man will get what he wants. He will get the moral support, the encouragem...
Adversity is a school that you need not apply to be enrolled. It has no respect for age, wealth, education, race, power, fame or beauty. It is a school among schools and every human being passes through the school in one format or the other. It is al...
I wish I could do whatever I liked behind the curtain of “madness”. Then: I’d arrange flowers, all day long, I’d paint; pain, love and tenderness, I would laugh as much as I feel like at the stupidity of others, and they would all say: “Poo...
Of all the wicked heresies and threatening movements facing the church in our day, when Westminster Seminary finally organized their faculty to write something in unison, they gave their determined political efforts not to fight socialism, not to fig...
To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labours, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, boots, cakes and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and...
When fishes flew and forests walked And figs grew upon thorn, Some moment when the moon was blood Then surely I was born. With monstrous head and sickening cry And ears like errant wings, The devil's walking parody On all four-footed things. The tatt...
