Hiro > Hiro's Quotes

“Abandon the urge to simplify everything, to look for formulas and easy answers, and to begin to think multidimensionally, to glory in the mystery and paradoxes of life, not to be dismayed by the multitude of causes and consequences that are inherent in each experience -- to appreciate the fact that life is complex.”
― M. Scott Peck

“The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
― Robert Frost

“Do we declare that the altar to the unknown god points to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob revealed by the Son? Or do we dismiss it out of hand as hopelessly pagan? Modern and contemporary art is not, to be sure, for the faint of Christian heart.”
― Daniel A. Siedell, God in the Gallery (Cultural Exegesis): A Christian Embrace of Modern Art

“So finding our place in the world as culture makers requires us to pay attention to culture’s many dimensions. We will make something of the world in a particular ethnic tradition, in particular spheres, at particular scales. There is no such thing as “the Culture,” and any attempt to talk about “the Culture,” especially in terms of “transforming the Culture,” is misled and misleading. Real culture making, not to mention cultural transformation, begins with a decision about which cultural world—or, better, worlds—we will attempt to make something of.”
― Andy Crouch, Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling

“When Christian teaching fails to connect beauty to the blessing of creation, an alternative account of beauty may develop. In some cases, beauty is appropriated and affirmed as a tool for witness to the gospel. The mistake here is subtle: rather than celebrating beauty as an aspect of the blessing of creation and thus an essential part of the good news of creation and its redemption, beauty becomes merely instrumental to Christian witness.”
― Jonathan R. Wilson, God's Good World: Reclaiming the Doctrine of Creation

“An industrial map in the mid-twentieth century colored New York’s Hudson River black. The mapmakers considered a black river a good thing—full of industry! The more factory outputs, the more progress. When that map was made, “nature” was widely seen as a resource to be exploited. Few people considered the consequences of careless disposal of industrial waste. The culture has shifted dramatically over the last fifty years. When I share this story today, most people shudder and ask how anyone could think of a polluted river as good.   But today we are doing the same thing with the river of culture. Think of the arts and other cultural enterprises as rivers that water the soil of culture. We are painting this cultural river black—full of industry, dominated by commercial interests, careless of toxic byproducts—and there are still cultural mapmakers who claim that this is a good thing. The pollution makes it difficult to for us to breathe, difficult for artists to create, difficult for any of us to see beauty through the murk.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life

“Many of the streams that feed the river of culture are polluted, and the soil this river should be watering is thus parched and fragmented. Most of these we know, but let me briefly touch on some of the fault lines in the cultural soil (starving the soul) as well as some of the sources of the poisons in the water (polluting the soul).   Starving the cultural soul   One of the most powerful sources of cultural fragmentation has grown out of the great successes of the industrial revolution. Its vision, standards, and methods soon proliferated beyond the factory and the economic realm and were embraced in sectors from education to government and even church. The result was reductionism. Modern people began to equate progress with efficiency. Despite valiant and ongoing resistance from many quarters—including industry—success for a large part of our culture is now judged by efficient production and mass consumption. We often value repetitive, machine-like performance as critical to “bottom line” success. In the seductive industrialist mentality, “people” become “workers” or “human resources,” who are first seen as interchangeable cogs, then treated as machines—and are now often replaced by machines.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life

“For any given provocation, we are egged on by our instant, omnipresent media to unleash our basest instincts—we might think of them as cultural “fight-flight-freeze” responses—rather than committing ourselves to the slower process of seeking truth.[15] (One genuinely new thing is the virtual mob, which can be just as inhumane and culturally damaging as any physical mob.)   This self-debasement of our humanity in desperate and irrational fear of the “other” is a result of poor cultural stewardship.”
― Makoto Fujimura, Culture Care: Reconnecting with Beauty for our Common Life

“Ask for work. If they don't give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, then take bread.”
― Emma Goldman, Anarchism and Other Essays

“Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems.”
― Murray Bookchin