Daniel Barrows > Daniel's Quotes

“When we lose our spiritual vocabulary, we lose much more than words. We lose the power of speaking grace, forgiveness, love, and justice over others.”
― Jonathan Merritt, Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing-and How We Can Revive Them

“Humility is the awareness that there’s a lot you don’t know and that a lot of what you think you know is distorted or wrong.”
― David Brooks, The Road to Character

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.”
― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

“Every condition exists,” Martin Luther King Jr. once wrote, “simply because someone profits by its existence. This economic exploitation is crystallized in the slum.” Exploitation. Now, there’s a word that has been scrubbed out of the poverty debate.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“Our words may not cause plants to sprout, but they can make hope spring forth in a human heart.”
― Jonathan Merritt, Learning to Speak God from Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing-and How We Can Revive Them

“I would like my life to be a statement of love and compassion--and where it isn't, that's where my work lies.”
― ram dass

“Ap Dijksterhuis and Loran Nordgren, have helped to answer this question with what they call a ‘theory of unconscious thought’. Their theory indicates that the more complex the problem, the more you should let your unconscious decide.”
― Jeremy Lent, The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe

“Suffering is part of our training program for becoming wise.”
― ram dass

“The eyes are the windows of the soul.... If someone was to look into your eyes, what would you want them to see?”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“Science, at its core, is simply a method of practical logic that tests hypotheses against experience. Scientism, by contrast, is the worldview and value system that insists that the questions the scientific method can answer are the most important questions human beings can ask, and that the picture of the world yielded by science is a better approximation to reality than any other.”
― John Michael Greer

“Careful and clear thinking requires a certain rigor; it is a skill, and, like all skills, it requires training, practice, and vigilance.”
― Robert J. Gula, Nonsense: A Handbook of Logical Fallacies

“There's a lot of talk these days about giving children self-esteem. It's not something you can give; it's something they have to build. Coach Graham worked in a no-coddling zone. Self-esteem? He knew there was really only one way to teach kids how to develop it: You give them something they can't do, they work hard until they find they can do it, and you just keep repeating the process.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“Most gurus and forecasters are willing to give people what they want: exotic reasons to believe that they are in with the smart crowd.”
― Ruchir Sharma, Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles

“We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“People often say my generation values authenticity. Reluctantly I will admit to being a member of my generation. If we value authenticity it’s because we’ve been bombarded since our impressionable preteen years with fakery”
― Lauren Oyler, Fake Accounts

“For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.”
― Eleanor Catton, The Luminaries

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”
― Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow

“Experience is what you get when you didn't get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

“People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or love.”
― Charles Bukowski, Women

“Gerson recognized what has become obvious to us: that scholastic theology, in its efforts to be scientific, unwittingly severed the intimate link between theology and spirituality, between theologians’ public thinking about what the Church believes and believers’ personal encounters with God in prayer and worship.”
― William Harmless, Mystics

“The mystic possesses his or her knowledge of God not from books or academic study, but from experience, from the experience of being loved intimately, intensely, by God.”
― William Harmless, Mystics

“I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside of you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It's hollow.”
― E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler

“It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.”
― Ram Dass

“What you meet in another being is the projection of your own level of evolution.”
― Ram Dass

“Everything changes once we identify with being the witness to the story, instead of the actor in it.”
― ram dass

“We are all affecting the world every moment, whether we mean to or not. Our actions and states of mind matter, because we are so deeply interconnected with one another.”
― ram dass

“If you want to have the kind of relationship that your heart yearns for, you have to create it. You can't depend on somebody else creating it for you.”
― Gary Zukav

“When the deepest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing, when your activities and actions become gratifying and purposeful, when what you do serves both yourself and others, when you do not tire within but seek the sweet satisfaction of your life and your work, you are doing what you were meant to be doing.”
― Gary Zukav

“... if we are to see the order of nature as a kind of story, then there has to be some kind of intelligence, some kind of wisdom, some kind of storyteller that makes it a story. There must be some kind of singer that sings this song. Not, of course, with our particular human, linguistic kind of intelligence and wisdom and singing, but with something analogous to these ... I want to appropriate the word "God" ... and use it to refer to the wisdom by which the world is a story, the singer by which nature is not just sound and fury but music. What I refer to as God is not any character in the drama of the universe but the author of the universe, the mystery of wisdom which we know of but cannot begin to understand, the wisdom that is the reason why there is a harmony called the universe which we can just stumblingly begin to understand. Our lives are a subplot in the story of the universe, but that story is not one we can comprehend, and it is one that often puzzles us and troubles us and sometimes outrages us. But it is a story. And I say this not because I have FAITH, or BELIEVE it, but simply because I cannot believe that existence is a tale told by an idiot. If I were to tell you what I believe, I would tell you much more. I would tell you that by the gift of faith I believe ... that the wisdom which made this drama so loved his human characters that he become one himself to share their lives; he chose to be a character in the story, to share their hopes and fears and suffering and death.”
― Herbert McCabe, Faith Within Reason

“One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programs by their intentions rather than their results.”
― Milton Friedman