(‘Home-made’ aphorisms and borrowed ones from much wittier people)
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Love is costly as much as it is freeing.
To be a peacemaker and a true lover, one must be a good fighter who will fight well and know which battles are worth fighting for when others have already given up and copped out.
Home is not a building or a zip code, it’s loving truly and being loved fully.
“Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
“The hunger for love is much more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” - Mother Teresa
“Love is loss: a deliberate, courageous form of giving yourself away.” – Jon Foreman
“If love were a choice who would choose such exquisite pain?” – from the movie ‘Anna & the King’
“The Bible tells us to love our neighbors and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people.” – G.K. Chesterton
“If it doesn’t break your heart it isn’t love.” – Jon Foreman
“Love is the triumph of imagination over intelligence.” – H. L. Mencken
“Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.” – Murdoch
“Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continual debt to love one another.” – Saint Paul
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“Employ thy time well, if thou meanest to get leisure.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Beware the barrenness of a busy life.” – Socrates
“If time were the wicked sheriff in a horse opera, I’d pay for riding lessons and take his gun away.” – W. H. Auden
“Time is real, we can’t rewind it / Out of everybody I met, who told the truth? Time did” – Common
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Mystery is not a problem requiring a solution but a truth awaiting revelation.
“The supernatural is the natural still not understood.”
“Miracles are not contrary to nature, but only contrary to what we know about nature.” – Saint Augustine
“For as the eyes of bats are to the blaze of day, so is the reason in our soul to the things which are by nature most evident of all.” – Aristotle
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Real intercession is praying for what God wills for me and other people not what I want for myself or what others desire for themselves.
Prayer is trusting God to do the right thing—the best thing—despite our limited vision and choices.
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Without afflictions or antagonists, life wouldn’t be much of the adventure that it is.
“I know God will not give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish that He didn’t trust me so much.” – Mother Teresa
“Suffering becomes beautiful when anyone bears great calamities with cheerfulness, not through insensibility but through greatness of mind.” – Aristotle
“Adversity has a way of revealing to us who are and how we see God.”
“Unless you embrace suffering you will never be free from it.”
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Don’t try to put humans inside stereotype boxes—they ain’t all cubes and squares.
“Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.” – Saint Augustine
“It is our light—not our darkness—that most frightens us.” – Nelson Mandela
“Man has made many machines, complex and cunning, but which of them indeed rivals the workings of his heart?” - Pablo Casals
“All learning which is acquired under compulsion has no hold upon the mind.” – Plato
“Sin is too stupid to see beyond itself.” – Alfred Lord Tennyson
“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them.” – Jack Kerouac
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.” -Mark Twain
“The problem is that Johnny doesn’t know what thinking is; he confuses it with feeling.” -Thomas Sowell
“Every sin is the distortion of an energy breathed into us…” – C.S. Lewis
“To be yourself in a world which is (trying) to make you everybody else, means to fight the hardest battle.” – E.E. Cummings
“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” -Mark Twain
“The heart has reasons that reason cannot know.” – Blaise Pascal
“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.” -Bob Dylan
“Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within” – George MacDonald
“To err is human- and to blame it on a computer even more so.” – Robert Orben
“We keep slaying our small dragons as the big one waits.” –Bukowski
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“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.” – Mother Teresa
“We, the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, for so long, with so little, we are now qualified to do anything with nothing.” – Mother Teresa
“Do your little bit of good where you are; it’s those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” — Desmond Tutu
“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld.” – Saint Augustine
“Who wants to be well-adjusted to injustice? What kind of human being do you want to be?” – Cornell West
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Sometime and somewhere in the history of the human sojourn, someone tampered with the map. But the prime destinations have always been holiness, not happiness; compassion, not accumulation; right relationships instead of rigorous religion, grace instead of greed.
“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
”The question is not what you look at but what you see.” – Henry David Thoreau
“To dare is to lose one’s footing momentarily. Not to dare is to lose oneself.” – Kierkegaard
“It is best to rise from life as from a banquet, neither thirsty nor drunken.” – Aristotle
“Speak only to improve the silence.” – (some ancient Chinese dude whose name I can’t read)
“Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once.” – Shakespeare
“Where is all the knowledge we lost with information?” –T.S. Eliot
“When we are no longer able to change a situation – we are challenged to change ourselves.” – Viktor Frankl
“Happiness is neither without us nor within us. It is in God, both without us and within us.” – Blaise Pascal
“Happy is a yuppie word.” –Bob Dylan
“Confining life to an eternal present is an insidious form of soul murder.” – Cornell West
“He not busy being born is busy dying.” – Bob Dylan “Show me a day when the world wasn’t new.” – Sister Barbara Hance
“A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.” – Thoreau
“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” – Nelson Mandela
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Some people see the church as a building with walls made of uniform bricks and they think there should be a qualifier for the limited number of persons who can enter it. They don’t see it as a body made up of different parts—diverse people with diverse functions and capacities, pains and brokenness, yet alive and growing as it is nourished.
“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.” -Jonathan Swift
“At the beginning of all spiritual endeavor stands humility, and he who loses it can achieve no other heights than the heights of disillusionment.” – Friedrich Dessauer
“Only he who believes is obedient and only he who is obedient believes.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“It is so hard to believe because it is so hard to obey.” – Kierkegaard
“You begin saving the world by saving one person at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.” – Bukowski
“Two basic loves: the love of god unto the forgetfulness of self or the love of self to the…denial of god.” – Augustine
“I pray that I may be quit of God to find God.” -Meister Eckhart
“Those who believe… without uncertainty, without doubt… believe only in the God idea, not God Himself.” – de Unamuno
“The number of people who have fled the church because it is too patient or compassionate is negligible.” -B. Manning
“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” – Anne Lamott
“To follow Jesus is to love your way through the darkness of this world.” – Cornell West
“The end of life is to be like God, and the soul following God will be like Him.” –Socrates
“You cannot have the truth in such a way that you catch it, but only in such a way that it catches you.” – Kierkegaard
“True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul” –Einstein
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“One cannot hope to truly forgive unless that person knows about the rich incomprehensible joy of being forgiven.” – Dan Allender
“It is very easy to overestimate the importance of our own achievements in comparison with what we owe others.” – Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“What each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something no one willed” – F. Engels
“We couldn’t live a day without depending on everybody.” – Will Rogers
“Action speaks louder than words but not nearly as often.” – Mark Twain
“We are all trying to love our crooked neighbors with our crooked hearts.” – Cornel West
“Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, and half shut afterwards.” -Benjamin Franklin
“By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you’ll be happy; a bad one, you’ll become a philosopher.” –Socrates
“As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent.” – Socrates
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Originality is not so much as standing on your own as much as it is riding on the shoulders of giants to reach new creative heights.
“Truth shines the brighter clad in verse.” – Jonathan Swift
“Don’t let schooling interfere with your education.” – Mark Twain
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – L. Cohen
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious…the cradle of all true art and science.” -Einstein
“A song is anything that can walk by itself.” -Bob Dylan
“I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” – Picasso
“The best craftsmanship always leaves holes… so that something that is not in the poem can creep in…” – Dylan Thomas
Your original quotes are AMZING!!! They are soo deep!!! They struck me, like no other quote has befor except for one Tennyson quote. I really LOVE your quotes. Pls write more!!!