Quotes by Theologians - Page 88

I wish I had never been born," she said. "What are we born for?" "For infinite happiness," said the Spirit. "You can step out into it at any moment...
C.S. Lewis
Happiness can only be achieved by looking inward & learning to enjoy whatever life has and this requires transforming greed into gratitude.
John Chrysostom
You are an ocean in a drop of dew,all the universes in a thin sack of blood.What are these pleasures then,these joys, these worldsthat you keep reaching for,hoping they will make you more alive?
Jalaluddin Rumi
God is the highest good of the reasonable creature. The enjoyment of him is our proper; and is the only happiness with which our souls can be satisfied. To go to heaven, fully to enjoy God, is infinitely better than the most pleasant accommodations here. Better than fathers and mothers, husbands, wives, or children, or the company of any, or all earthly friends. These are but shadows; but the enjoyment of God is the substance. These are but scattered beams; but God is the sun. These are but streams; but God is the fountain. These are but drops, but God is the ocean.
Jonathan Edwards
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.
Albert Schweitzer
There is a kind of happiness and wonder that makes you serious. It is too good to waste on jokes.
C.S. Lewis
Sometimes we must undergo hardships, breakups, and narcissistic wounds, which shatter the flattering image that we had of ourselves, in order to discover two truths: that we are not who we thought we were; and that the loss of a cherished pleasure is not necessarily the loss of true happiness and well-being. (109)
Jean-Yves Leloup
The pain I feel now is the happiness I had before. That's the deal.
C.S. Lewis
There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.
G.K. Chesterton
Ingratitude is the soul's enemy... Ingratitude is a burning wind that dries up the source of love, the dew of mercy, the streams of grace.
Bernard of Clairvoux
The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.
Catherine of Siena
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love.The wound is the place where the Light enters you.Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round in another form.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The journey of prayer for Franciscans is the discovery of God at the center of our lives. We pray not to acquire a relationship with God as if acquiring something that did not previously exist. Rather, we pray to disclose the image of God in which we are created, the God within us, that is, the one in whom we are created and in whom lies the seed of our identity. We pray so as to discover what we already have—“the incomparable treasure hidden in the field of the world and of the human heart. (St. Clare)
Ilia Delio O.S.F.
One who has reached a goal no longer travels the road"(Pauline Christianity, p. 111)
John Ziesler
I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller
G.K. Chesterton
There is no power like that of prevailing prayer - of Abraham pleading for Sodom, Jacob wrestling in the stillness of the night, Moses standing in the breach, Hannah intoxicated with sorrow, David heartbroken with remorse and grief, Jesus in sweat and blood. Add to this list from the records of the church your personal observation and experience, and always there is cost of passion unto blood. Such prayer prevails. It turns ordinary mortals into men of power. It brings power. It brings fire. It brings rain. It brings life. It brings God.
Samuel Chadwick
Your heart is the size of an ocean. Go find yourself in its hidden depths.
Jalaluddin Rumi
When you go through a hard period,When everything seems to oppose you,... When you feel you cannot even bear one more minute,NEVER GIVE UP!Because it is the time and place that the course will divert!
Jalaluddin Rumi
Only the learned read old books, and... now... they are of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom by doing so. ...[G]reat scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the most ignorant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk..." [for] ...when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer's development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man's colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question." To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge-to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behavior-this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded. ... [Therefore, even though] learning makes a free commerce between the ages... every generation [is cut] off from all others... [and] ...characteristic errors of one [are not] corrected by the characteristic truths of another.
C.S. Lewis
The Wise are Superb Observers of Nature and Rise Superior to the Blows of Fortune
Philo of Alexandria
...you have to be godly to be wise ...
Derek Kidner
Whatever can be threatened, whatever can be shaken, whatever you fear cannot stand, is destined to crash. Do not go down with the ship. Let that which is destined to become the past slip away. Believe that the real you is that which beckons from the future. If it is a sadder you, it will be a wiser one. And dawn will follow the darkness sooner or later. Rebirth can never come without death.
Robert M. Price
There is only one thing which is generally safe from plagiarism -- self-denial.
G.K. Chesterton
A people religiously right, will not long remain politically wrong.
William Arnot
I do not expect old heads on young shoulders.
C.S. Lewis
men are undoubtedly more in danger from prosperity than from adversity. for when matters go smoothly, they flatter themselves, and are intoxicated by their success
John Calvin
The ultimate difference between God's wisdom and man's wisdom is how they relate to the glory of God's grace in Christ crucified. God's wisdom makes the glory of God's grace our supreme treasure. But man's wisdom delights in seeing himself as resourceful, self-sufficient, self determining, and not utterly dependent on God's free grace.
John Piper
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common. this is my symphony.
William Ellery Channing
An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald]
C.S. Lewis
humility is beyond our reach. if it were a product of reaching, we would instinctively be proud of reaching it. it is a gift.
John Piper
If there is a wasp in the room, I’d like to be able to see it.
C.S. Lewis
Wisdom is the recovery of innocence at the far end of experience.
David Bentley Hart
It is important never to separate love and knowledge, compassion and wisdom. A wisdom without compassion is closed upon itself and does not bear fruit. A compassion without wisdom is a madness and a cause of suffering.
Jean-Yves Leloup
Confidence that one's impressions are God-given is no guarantee that this is really so, even when they persist and grow stronger through long seasons of prayer. Bible-based wisdom must judge them.
J.I. Packer
A great benefit of Sabbath keeping is that we learn to let God take care of us — not by becoming passive and lazy, but in the freedom of giving up our feeble attempts to be God in our own lives.
Marva J. Dawn
As we grow detached from things, we come (with God's help) to master our desires, and we give the mastery over to God. Discipline and divine grace heal the intellect and the will of the effects of concupiscence. We can begin to see things clearly.
Scott Hahn
Mirrors that hide nothing hurt me. But this is the hurt of purging and precious renewal - and these are the mirrors of dangerous grace.
Walter Wangerin Jr.
Knowledge that is acquiredis not like this. Those who have it worry ifaudiences like it or not.It's a bait for popularity.Disputational knowing wants customers.It has no soul...The only real customer is God.Chew quietlyyour sweet sugarcane God-Love, and stayplayfully childish.
Jalaluddin Rumi
It is, therefore, a great source of virtue for the practiced mind to learn, bit by bit, first to change about in visible and transitory things, so that afterwards it may be possible to leave them behind altogether. The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land. The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his. From boyhood I have dwelt on foreign soil and I know with what grief sometimes the mind takes leave of the narrow hearth of a peasant's hut, and I know too how frankly it afterwards disdains marble firesides and panelled halls.
Hugh of Saint-Victor
The compassionate person does not require other people to be stupid, in order to be intelligent. Their intelligence is for everyone, so as to have a world in which there is less ignorance. (118)
Jean-Yves Leloup
A craftsman pulled a reed from the reedbed,cut holes in it, and called it a human being.Since then, it's been wailing a tender agonyof parting, never mentioning the skillthat gave it life as a flute
Jalaluddin Rumi
For my own part, I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await others. I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.
C.S. Lewis
Where lowland is, that's where water goes. All medicine wants is pain to cure.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The next best thing to being wise oneself is to live in a circle of those who are.
C.S. Lewis
How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.
Jalaluddin Rumi
A person is a person through other persons.None of us comes into the world fully formed. We would not know how to think, or walk, or speak, or behave as human beings unless we learned it from other human beings. We need other human beings in order to be human. I am because other people are. A person is entitled to a stable community life, and the first of these communities is the family.
Desmond Tutu
Aren't you, like me, hoping that some person, thing, or event will come along to give you that final feeling of inner well-being you desire? Don't you often hope: 'May this book, idea, course, trip, job, country or relationship fulfill my deepest desire.' But as long as you are waiting for that mysterious moment you will go on running helter-skelter, always anxious and restless, always lustful and angry, never fully satisfied. You know that this is the compulsiveness that keeps us going and busy, but at the same time makes us wonder whether we are getting anywhere in the long run. This is the way to spiritual exhaustion and burn-out. This is the way to spiritual death.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
Don't forget to love yourself.
Søren Kierkegaard
Bitter your acts, bitter am I,Kindness your deeds, kindness am I,Pleasant and gentle, so you are,Fine honeyed lips and sweet talker.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Affliction is often that thing which prepares an ordinary person for some sort of an extraordinary destiny.
C.S. Lewis
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
Erasmus
My father always used to say, "Don't raise your voice. Improve your argument." Good sense does not always lie with the loudest shouters, nor can we say that a large, unruly crowd is always the best arbiter of what is right.
Desmond Tutu
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.
C.S. Lewis
This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Suffering is a gift. In it is hidden mercy.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
Jalaluddin Rumi
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself.
Jalaluddin Rumi
The practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance.
Miroslav Volf
Lo! my God, without merit on my part, of His pure and free mercy, has given to me (an unworthy, condemned, and contemptible creature) all the riches of justification and salvation in Christ.For such a Father then, who has overwhelmed me with these inestimable riches of His, why should I not freely, cheerfully, with my whole heart and with an eager will, do all that I know will be pleasing to Him, and acceptable in His sight?I will therefore give myself, as a sort of Christ, to my neighbor, as Christ has given Himself to me; and will do nothing in this life, except what I see will be needful, advantageous, and wholesome for my neighbor, since by faith I abound in all good things in Christ.
Martin Luther
SUDDEN RESURRECTION! Endless mercy!Blazing fire in the thickets of thought! Today you came laughing Unlocking dungeons Came to the meek Like god’s grace and bountyYou are the antechamber to the sunYou are the hope’s prerequisite You are sought Seeker Terminus PrincipiaYou pulse in every chest adorn every idea then permit their realizationSpirit- spring, irreplaceableDelight of action and cognition.All the rest is pretext, fraud- the former, illness; the latter, cureWe’re jaundiced by that fraudHeart-set to slay an innocentDrunk, now on angel eyesNow on plain bread and soupTaste this intoxication, drop your ratiocination Savor these delectable Drop the debatablesA little bread and greensShould not entail so much trouble*Ghazal 1
Jalaluddin Rumi