Carole > Carole's Quotes

“In spite of our sinfulness, in spite of the darkness surrounding our souls, the Grace of the Holy Spirit, conferred by baptism in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, still shines in our hearts with the inextinguishable light of Christ ... and when the sinner turns to the way of repentance the light smooths away every trace of the sins committed, clothing the former sinner in the garments of incorruption, spun of the Grace of the Holy Spirit. It is this acquisition of the Holy Spirit about which I have been speaking.”
― St. Seraphim of Sarov

“You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives. All condemnation is from the devil. Never condemn each other. We condemn others only because we shun knowing ourselves. When we gaze at our own failings, we see such a swamp that nothing in another can equal it. That is why we turn away, and make much of the faults of others. Instead of condemning others, strive to reach inner peace. Keep silent, refrain from judgement. This will raise you above the deadly arrows of slander, insult and outrage and will shield your glowing hearts against all evil.”
― St. Seraphim of Sarov

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
― Primo Levi

“Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.”
― Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

“Reading a book is like re-writing it for yourself. You bring to a novel, anything you read, all your experience of the world. You bring your history and you read it in your own terms.”
― Angela Carter

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“In an age of hope men looked up at the night sky and saw “the heavens." In an age of hopelessness they call it simply “space.”
― Peter Kreeft

“It is true, then, that as soon as someone becomes a Christian, he or she can and must say `Our Father'; that is one of the marks of grace, one of the first signs of faith. But it will take full Christian maturity to understand, and resonate with, what those words really mean.”
― N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

“Saying `our father' isn't just the boldness, the sheer cheek, of
walking into the presence of the living and almighty God and saying `Hi, Dad.' It is the boldness, the sheer total risk, of saying quietly `Please may I, too, be considered an apprentice son.' It means signing on for the Kingdom of God.”
― N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

“When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father's purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.”
― N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

“how much more ought we to cherish and marvel at the fact that for nearly two thousand years people have prayed this prayer. When you take these words on your lips you stand on hallowed ground.”
― N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

“This prayer doesn't pretend that pain and hunger aren't real. Some religions say that; Jesus didn't. This prayer doesn't use the greatness and majesty of God to belittle the human plight. Some religions do that; Jesus didn't. This prayer starts by addressing God intimately and lovingly, as `Father' - and by bowing before his greatness and majesty. If you can hold those two together, you're already on the way to understanding what Christianity is all about.”
― N.T. Wright, The Lord and His Prayer

“We all carry in our heads a model of reality put there by tradition, training, custom, and prejudice. When the events of life and the behavior of persons around us conform to this model, we are at peace; and when they don’t conform, we feel upset. Thus, what in truth upsets us is not those persons or those events, but the model we carry with us. This model is arbitrary and accidental. Realize that, and you will not feel upset anymore at anything.”
― Carlos G. Vallés, Mastering Sadhana: On Retreat With Anthony De Mello

“Of what use is it to be tolerant of others if you are convinced that you are right and everyone who disagrees with you is wrong? That isn’t tolerance but condescension.”
― Anthony de Mello, The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony de Mello

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”
― Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“Joy is the infallible sign of the presence of God.”
― Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

“No one remains discouraged by his own failures except he who was vain enough to believe himself above all failure.”
― Rodney Collin, The Theory of Conscious Harmony

“True humility is connected with giving up the luxury of worrying about ourselves—it makes no difference whether it is in the form of vanity about our achievements or doubts that we can do what is required of us. Both are preoccupation about ourselves, and preoccupied with oneself one cannot see what is needed nor be open to receive the help which is pouring down upon us all the time, and which if we trust in it can enable us to do the impossible.”
― Rodney Collin, The Theory of Conscious Harmony

“Suffering is not avoided, and is even sought for, simply because it is the hardest thing for man to deal with, and the greatest test of his acquired power of separating his consciousness from his bodily manifestations and looking down upon these objectively.”
― Rodney Collin, The Theory Of Eternal Life

“Nothing is ever finally achieved till death, and even that must at the same time be merely a new beginning with new equipment.”
― Rodney Collin, The Theory of Conscious Harmony

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
― Mark Twain

“You probably wouldn’t worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do.”
― Olin Miller

“Why was this bloody world created?"

"As a sewer for the stars," a voice in front of him said. "Alternatively to know God and to glorify Him forever."

" [...] The two answers are not, of course, necessarily alternative.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“An hour's conversation on literature between two ardent minds with a common devotion to a neglected poet is a miraculous road to intimacy.”
― Charles Williams, War in Heaven

“The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.”
― Charles Williams, The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante

“Se ne potevano trarre due conseguenze filosofiche tra loro contrastanti: l'elogio della purezza, che protegge dal male come un usbergo; l'elogio dell'impurezza, che dà adito ai mutamenti, cioè alla vita. Scartai la prima, disgustosamente moralistica, e mi attardai a considerare la seconda, che mi era più congeniale. Perché la ruota giri, perché la vita viva, ci vogliono le impurezze: anche nel terreno, come è noto, se ha da essere fertile. Ci vuole il diverso, il diverso, il grano di sale e di senape: il fascismo non li vuole, li vieta, e per questo tu non sei fascista; vuole tutti uguali e tu non sei uguale. Ma neppure la virtù immacolata esiste, o se esiste è detestabile”
― Primo Levi, The Periodic Table