Jami Fultz > Jami's Quotes

“It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.”
― Charles C. Mann

“I wrote the story, but you will bring to it your own experience of life, and some other reader will do the same, and it will become a different story with each reader. I believe that even the time in your life when you read the book will determine how you receive it. Our lives are changing constantly, and therefore not even our own story is always what we think it is.”
― Elizabeth Strout, The Burgess Boys

“The most of us make our backs ache carrying useless, foolish burdens. We carry luggage and rubbish that are of no earthly use, but which sap our strength and keep us jaded and tired to no purpose. If we could only learn to hold on to the things worthwhile, and drop the rubbish, — let go the useless, the foolish, the silly, the hamperers, the things that hinder, — we should not only make progress but we should keep happy and harmonious.”
― Orison Swett Marden

“To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

“No pain that we suffer, no trial that we experience is wasted. It ministers to our education, to the development of such qualities as patience, faith, fortitude and humility. All that we suffer and all that we endure, especially when we endure it patiently, builds up our characters, purifies our hearts, expands our souls, and makes us more tender and charitable, more worthy to be called the children of God . . . and it is through sorrow and suffering, toil and tribulation, that we gain the education that we come here to acquire and which will make us more like our Father and Mother in heaven.”
― Orson F. Whitney

“What win I, if I gain the thing I seek?
A dream, a breath, a froth of fleeting joy.
Who buys a minute's mirth to wail a week?
Or sells eternity to get a toy?
For one sweet grape who will the vine destroy?
Or what fond beggar, but to touch the crown,
Would with the sceptre straight be strucken down?”
― William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

“On most days, if I'm true to myself, I just want to share my life with the poor, regardless of result. I want to lean into the challenge of intractable problems with as tender a heart as I can locate, knowing that there is some divine ingenuity here, "the slow work of God," that gets done if we're faithful.”
― Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“I steep in the utter fullness of not wanting to have anyone else's life but my own.”
― Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Mother Teresa diagnosed the world's ills in this way: we've just "forgotten that we belong to each other." Kinship is what happens to us when we refuse to let that happen.”
― Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“There is no force in the world better able to alter anything from its course than love. Ruskin's comment that you can get someone to remove his coat more surely with a warm, gentle sun than with a cold, blistering wind is particularly apt.”
― Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“Leon Dufour, a world-renowned Jesuit theologian and Scripture scholar, a year before he died at ninety-nine, confided in a Jesuit who was caring for him, "I have written so many books on God, but after all that, what do I really know? I think, in the end, God is the person you're talking to, the one right in front of you." I mantra I use often, to keep me focused in delight on the person in front of me, comes from an unlikely place. Richard Rolheiser writes that, "the opposite of depression is not happiness, it's delight." After all, we breathe in the Spirit that delights in our being. We don't breathe in the Spirit that just sort of puts up with our mess. It's about delight.”
― Greg Boyle, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“Truth is confirmed by inspection and delay; falsehood by haste and uncertainty.”
― Tacitus

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, 'Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?' Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”
― Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles"

“A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses.”
― David Brooks, The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

“One day the stars will be as familiar to each man as the landmarks, the curves, and the hills on the road that leads to his door, and one day this will be an airborne life. But by then men will have forgotten how to fly; they will be passengers on machines whose conductors are carefully promoted to a familiarity with labelled buttons, and in whose minds knowledge of the sky and the wind and the way of weather will be extraneous as passing fiction.”
― Beryl Markham, West with the Night

“Too many people go through life complaining about their problems. I've always believed that if you took one tenth the enrgy you put into complaining and applied it to solving the problem, you'd be surprised by how well things can work out.”
― Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture