Brian > Brian's Quotes

“The person with a secular mentality feels himself to be the center of the universe. Yet he is likely to suffer from a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance because he knows he’s but one human among five billion others - all feeling themselves to be the center of things - scratching out an existence on the surface of a medium-sized planet circling a small star among countless stars in a galaxy lost among countless galaxies. The person with the sacred mentality, on the other hand, does not feel herself to be the center of the universe. She considers the Center to be elsewhere and other. Yet she is unlikely to feel lost or insignificant precisely because she draws her significance and meaning from her relationship, her connection, with that center, that Other.”
― M. Scott Peck, A World Waiting to Be Born: Civility Rediscovered

“Some people believe the alternative to bad religion is secularism, but that's wrong . . . . The answer to bad religion is better religion--prophetic rather than partisan, broad and deep instead of narrow, and based on values as opposed to ideology.”
― Jim Wallis, The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith & Politics in a Post-Religious Right America

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Who was it who said, "I hold the buying of more books than one can peradventure read, as nothing less than the soul's reaching towards infinity; which is the only thing that raises us above the beasts that perish?" Whoever it was, I agree with him.”
― A. Edward Newton, A magnificent farce and other diversions of a book collector

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”
― Gabriel Garcia Marquez

“I think it is all a matter of love; the more you love a memory the stronger and stranger it becomes”
― Vladimir Nabokov

“God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.”
― J.M. Barrie

“In sorrow we must go, but not in despair. Behold! we are not bound for ever to the circles of the world, and beyond them is more than memory.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien