Quotes by Canadian Authors - Page 97

No one is too poor to give a smile - a gift, often, of greater consequence than any sum of money.
Vironika Tugaleva
Talking with the mouth of a beast won't ease your pain.
Andrew Davidson
Sometimes "No" is the kindest word.
Vironika Tugaleva
Does he expect the flood to just move out of his way if he asks nicely?
Tanya Huff
Be kind to yourself. Remember that when you abuse yourself, you will experience the anger, regret, and apathy of the bully as well as the depression, anxiety, and insecurity of the victim. Whatever you do, be kind to yourself.
Vironika Tugaleva
We cannot know. But sometimes there is kindness, and sometimes there is love.
Guy Gavriel Kay
Human beings who leave behind them no great achievements, but only a series of small kindnesses, have not had wasted lives
Charlotte Gray
Wouldn’t this old world be better If the folks we meet would say: ‘I know something good about you,’ And then treat us that way?
N. Eldon Tanner
Moments of kindness and reconciliation are worth having, even if the parting has to come sooner or later.
Alice Munro
Dare we care at all about current fashions if that means reducing our ability to help hungry neighbors? How many more luxuries should we buy for ourselves and our children when others are dying for lack of bread?
Ronald J. Sider
...writers, like priests, should have compassion...and a sensitivity to pain...
John Geddes
And I realized a wondrous truth: that knowledge could be our treasure, that there were things humankind knew that we did not, that our conquest need not comprise taking and killing, but could consist of our mutual conquest of ignorance and distrust.
Rachel Hartman
When you see a person acting violently, ask yourself whether he knows how powerful he is. If he knew his power, would he feel the need to assert it?
Vironika Tugaleva
Though your acts of love and compassion cannot penetrate bandages or armour, they are never wasted and never lost. They sit within the recipient’s mind, awaiting his awakening.
Vironika Tugaleva
Once you understand love, you don’t need a reward your kindness or compassion just like you don’t need a reward for breathing.
Vironika Tugaleva
In the world of so-called villains, what we need is not another hero. What we need is to stop the influx of people who dress themselves as menaces and proceed to harm others.
Vironika Tugaleva
It is only once you see the baffled expression on the face of your enemy when you give his cruel words a warm smile that you’ll understand, truly understand, what love is all about.
Vironika Tugaleva
We deny the same love to others that we deny ourselves. We distort others in the same way we distort ourselves.
Vironika Tugaleva
By serving humanity, I automatically serve myself.
Vironika Tugaleva
When we can see our own self, angry and hurting others, within every villain, then we can love. When we can see our own desperate struggle for belonging in the eyes of every enemy, then we can love. When we can look at the greatest of atrocities and see the opportunity for healing within, then, and only then, can we really love.
Vironika Tugaleva
People who don’t know how to use their minds can’t really know how to use their hearts either.
Vironika Tugaleva
He keeps his voice kindly but remote. A cross between a pedagogue, soothsayer, and a benevolent uncle – that should be his tone.
Margaret Atwood
Those who’ve left their bootprints in the trenches are those who value human life most. They get unwanted glimpses into the savage nature we really have underneath all the expensive clothes and moisturized skin. This of course, rules out the politicians, feminists, and liberals who are far too cozy hiding behind their daddies’ wallets and sophomoric mentalities as those who feign having tasted the true consequence of a single blood-drop darkening the sand.
Bruce Crown
Curious, he thought, how, if you knew a person long enough, he could elicit every kind of emotion from you, every possible reaction, envy, admiration, pity, irritation, fury, fondness, jealousy, love, disgust. But in the end all human beings became candidates for compassion, all of us, without exception...and if we could recognize this from the beginning, what a saving in pain and grief and misery.
Rohinton Mistry
Beauty is wasted on the self-absorbed.
Lorii Myers
When we are in constant pain, we cannot empathize with others, nor can we help them. It is only when we allow ourselves to open up to our own nourishment that we are free to feed the rest of the world. And thus, to attend to one's own suffering is the most selfless act.
Vironika Tugaleva
Whenever tragic loss occurs, you either resist or you yield. Some people become bitter or deeply resentful; others become compassionate, wise, and loving. Yielding means inner acceptance of what is.You are open to life.
Eckhart Tolle
The shock of public hostility served as a stimulant. It made them acutely conscious of how society functioned.
David Brooks
To help people, love them. Then, they help themselves.
Vironika Tugaleva
Food-sharing is an innate way that we show our love for people we care about. Including others in times of celebration is an act of kindness.
Dr. Theresa Nicassio
Kindness that turns to bitterness when it is not appreciated was never kindness at all.
Vironika Tugaleva
Then his heart made up his mind.
Lindsay Mattick
Punker, what's compassion for a world this far gone? The streets don't give a fuck. It's a bummer, your care slides down its target like beads of rain on rock. There's no aquifer for any shit like this. Where does compassion go and can it be returned? You're Donn in this world, with the staff and the purple band. The artificer. Walking the bandoned suites of hell and your eyeballs thinking, what can be saved? Not their gear but its aspects. You started kung fu way later than the rest, and before that you saw compassion in a history spiel. Now it keeps washing up on your shore. Giving a shit might be made of parts, it might be made solo. It might be an invasive species or not. Punks evolved from dinos too. Not even cross time and distance. But the spikes on their heads are the same.
Noah Wareness
Fall open. Break open. Sit with others' openness. Let love be your medicine.
Vironika Tugaleva
I wanted, for so long, for someone to understand me better than I understood myself, to take control of me, to save me, to make it all better. I thought that the hardest part of a loving, mutually healing relationship would be showing my vulnerable, raw spots to a person, even though I'd been hurt so many times before. This has not been the hardest part. The actual hardest part has been realizing that no one, no matter how compassionate and kind they are, will say the perfect things always. Myself included. The hardest part has been learning to communicate what I need, to hear what others need, to tell others how to tell me what they need. Intimacy takes a lot of communication. We all have triggers. I don't know your triggers and you don't know mine. No matter how much I love or trust you, you cannot possibly know exactly the words I need to hear, the words I don't want to hear, and the way I like to be touched. And how strange that we expect these things of each other. How strange, and self-sabotaging, that we refuse to get into relationships and friendships with people unless they treat us in just that perfect way. We've been raised to want fairy tales. We've been raised to wait for flawless saviors to rescue us. But the savior isn't flawless and the savior is not coming. The savior is you. The savior is still learning. The savior is never done learning. The savior is a human being. Forget perfect. Forget flawless. And start speaking your truth. Start speaking what you want and how you want it. And start asking and listening, really listening, to what the people around you say. Maybe, then, we will stop abandoning and hurting each other. Maybe, then, there's hope for us.
Vironika Tugaleva
When someone is cruel, harsh, mean, to not take their words personally is one thing, but to hear the silent cry within those words is another. This sort of perspective can not only liberate us from crippling self-doubt in the face of criticism, it can also liberate us from automatically becoming blind participants in the interaction patterns that the cruel person has become accustomed to—a favour we do for the other person as much as for ourselves.
Vironika Tugaleva
Let those feelings out. Talk about it. Even if you’re talking to your journal by yourself in an empty room. That still counts. That still matters.If you know someone who’s struggling and isolated, help them talk about it. Even if they don’t have the right words. Even if you sit in silence as they try to feel safe. Even if they shower you with complaints, excuses, and justifications. Even if you can see they’re just playing small, being irrational, blaming circumstances. Just be there. It all counts. It all matters.
Vironika Tugaleva
Complex thinkers attempt to extend to others the same self-forgiving bias that they offer themselves.
Ted Cadsby
Nor is it the spirit of those Christians - alas, they are many - whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on by themselves. The Christmas spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For the Christmas spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole lives on the principle of making themselves poor - spending and being spent - to enrich their fellowmen, giving time, trouble, care and concern to do good to others - and not just their own friends - in whatever way there seems need.
J.I. Packer
If literature does one thing, it makes you more empathetic by making you live other lives and feel the pain of others. Ideologues don't feel the pain of others because they haven't imaginatively got under their skins.
Yann Martel
But without wisdom, imagination is like a cruel taskmaster.
William Paul Young
It is precisely this refusal of the Cartesian paradigm that characterizes Radical Orthodoxy, which seeks to reanimate the account of knowledge offered by Augustine and Aquinas. On this ancient-medieval-properly-postmodern model, we rightly give up pretensions to absolute knowledge or certainty, but we do not thereby give up on knowledge altogether. Rather, we can properly confess that we know God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, but such knowledge rests on the gift of (particular, special) revelation, is not universally objective or demonstrable, and remains a matter of interpretation and perspective (with a significant appreciation for the role of the Spirit's regeneration and illumination as a condition for knowledge). We confess knowledge without certainty, truth without objectivity.
James K.A. Smith
But should we accept this negative view of power? Is power all bad? Specifically, can Christians share in this devaluation of power and discipline as inherently evil? Can we who claim to be disciples - who are called and predestined to be conformed to the likeness of the Son (Rom. 8:29) - be opposed to discipline and formation as such? Can we who are called to be subject to the Lord of life really agree with the liberal Enlightenment notion of the autonomous self? Are we not above all called to subject ourselves to our Domine and conform to his image? Of course, we are called not to conform to the patterns of 'this world' (Rom. 12:2) or to our previous evil desires (1 Peter 1:14), but that is a call not to nonconformity as such but rather to an alternative conformity through a counterformation in Christ, a transformation and renewal directed toward conformity to his image. By appropriating the liberal Enlightenment notion of negative freedom and participating in its nonconformist resistance to discipline (and hence a resistance to the classical spiritual disciplines), Christians are in fact being conformed to the patterns of this world (contra Rom. 12:2).
James K.A. Smith
Does that mean,' said Mack, 'that all roads lead to you?''Not at all.' Jesus smiled as he reached for the door handle to the shop. 'Most roads don't lead anywhere. What it does mean is that I will travel any road to find you.
William Paul Young
There are no unique postures and times and limitations that restrict our access to God. My relationship with God is intimate and personal. The Christian does not go to the temple to worship. The Christian takes the temple with him or her. Jesus lifts us beyond the building and pays the human body the highest compliment by making it His dwelling place, the place where He meets with us. Even today He would overturn the tables of those who make it a marketplace for their own lust, greed and wealth.
Ravi Zacharias
The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life's twin realities, love and hate.
Ravi Zacharias
Mackenzie, the truth shall set you free and the truth has a name; he's over in the woodshop right now covered in sawdust. Everything is about him. And freedom is a process that happens inside a relationship with him. Then all that stuff you feel churnin' around inside will start to work its way out.
William Paul Young
More to the point, what was the lesson that the first Christians drew from crucifixion? Today such a barbarity might galvanize people into opposing brutal regimes, or demanding that such torture never again be inflicted on a living creature. But those weren´t the lessons the early Christians drew at all. No, the execution of Jesus is The Good News, a necessary step in the most wonderful episode in history. In allowing the crucifixion to take place, God did the world an incalculable favor. Though infinitely powerful, compassionate, and wise, he could think of no other way to reprieve humanity from punishment for its sins (in particular, for the sin of being descended from a couple who had disobeyed him) that to allow, an innocent man (his son no less) to be impaled through the limbs and slowly suffocate in agony. By acknowledging that this sadistic murder was a gift of divine mercy, people could earn eternal life. And if they failed to see the logic in all this, their flesh would be seared by fire for all eternity.
Steven Pinker
In Jesus Christ, there is no distance or separation between the medium and the message: it is the one case where we can say that the medium and the message are fully one and the same.
Marshall McLuhan
You cannot find excellent corporate worship until you stop trying to find excellent corporate worship and pursue God himself.
D A Carson
Poor Mary. They married her to Jesus, and Jesus is an asexual circumcised revolutionary. What future is there to be had in that scenario?
Rawi Hage
The heart of Christ is not only the heart of a man but has in it also the tenderness and gentleness of a woman. Jesus was not a man in the rigid sense of manhood as distinct from womanhood, but, as the Son of Man, the complete Head of Humanity.
A.B. Simpson
The answer to anxiety is always to exalt Christ.
Ann Voskamp
To get where you want to go, the first question you always have to answer is Where am I? ... We only find out where we are when we find out where He is. We only find ourselves... when we find Him.
Ann Voskamp
I want to remind pastors and leaders that we do not own the church—God does. We aren't called to serve the church from a place of fear with our primary focus on protecting our boundaries. We are called to fling wide the doors, to invite to the banquet those on the margins, those who will challenge our comfort and our aversion to getting our hands dirty. Announcing the kingdom is risky business. When our experience of church becomes so predictable and so controlled, one has to wonder how far we've strayed from the calling to be ambassadors of reconciliation to those far beyond the walls of the church.
Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter
I believe God intervenes in the lives of every one of us. He speaks to us in different ways and at different times so that we may know he is the author of our very personality.
Ravi Zacharias
The day that each person willingly accepts himself or herself for who he or she is and acknowledges the uniqueness of God's framing process marks the beginning of a journey to seeing the handiwork of God in each life.
Ravi Zacharias
To be able to accept the wonder and the marvel of one's own personality, however flawed or 'accidental,' and place it in and trust it to the hands of the One who made it, is one of the greatest achievements in life.
Ravi Zacharias
Perfection, then, is not a change in the essential character but the completion of a course. This is precisely what Jesus must have meant when he admonished his disciples and us to 'be perfect,' as our Heavenly Father is perfect.
Ravi Zacharias
One of the most convicting things I have recently come to realize about Jesus is that He was never, not once, in a hurry.
Mark Buchanan