Christopher > Christopher's Quotes

“But what if we saw lessons and talks as connections to the sacrament rather than as unrelated secondary activities? What if we saw them as opportunities to bear with one another in all our infirmities and ineptitude?”
― Terryl L. Givens, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

“Worship, then, is about what we are prepared to relinquish—what we give up at personal cost.”
― Terryl L. Givens, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith

“Faith is a strange creature,” Schuster said. “Like a falcon that nests year after year in the same place, but then flies away, sometimes for years, only to return again, stronger than ever.”
― Mark T. Sullivan, Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“But someone very wise once told me that by opening our hearts, revealing our scars, we are made human and flawed and whole.”
― Mark T. Sullivan, Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“We never know what will happen next, what we will see, and what important person will come into our life, or what important person we will lose. Life is change, constant change, and unless we are lucky enough to find comedy in it, change is nearly always a drama, if not a tragedy. But after everything, and even when the skies turn scarlet and threatening, I still believe that if we are lucky enough to be alive, we must give thanks for the miracle of every moment of every day, no matter how flawed. And we must have faith in God, and in the Universe, and in a better tomorrow, even if that faith is not always deserved.”
― Mark T. Sullivan, Beneath a Scarlet Sky

“But this Peterson, though erudite, didn’t come across as a pedant.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“How could the world be freed from the terrible dilemma of conflict, on the one hand, and psychological and social dissolution, on the other? The answer was this: through the elevation and development of the individual, and through the willingness of everyone to shoulder the burden of Being and to take the heroic path.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable. In my experience—clinical and otherwise—it’s just never been that simple. Besides, if you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“That’s to encourage her, in everything she wants courageously to do, but to include in that genuine appreciation the fact of her femininity: to recognize the importance of having a family and children and to forego the temptation to denigrate or devalue that in comparison to accomplishment of personal ambition or career. It’s not for nothing that the Holy Mother and Infant is a divine image—as we just discussed. Societies that cease to honour that image—that cease to see that relationship as of transcendent and fundamental importance—also cease to be.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

“of sameness. This is as true of Zion as it is of marriage. The poet Coventry Patmore wrote that the bonds that unite us in community consist “not in similarity, but in dissimilarity; the happiness of love, in which alone happiness resid[es] . . . not in unison, but conjunction, which can only be between spiritual dissimilars.”30 This is why the body of Christ needs its full complement of members—the devout, the wayward, the uncomfortable, the struggling. “It does not mean that a man is not good because he errs in doctrine,” Joseph said of a Mormon rebuked by others for his preaching. “It feels so good not to be trammeled.”31 This is the spirit in which one Church leader recently noted that not only unique backgrounds but “unique talents and perspectives” and “diversity of persons and peoples” are “a strength of this Church.”32”
― Terryl L. Givens, The Crucible of Doubt: Reflections on the Quest for Faith