Rebecca > Rebecca's Quotes

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
― Bill Keane

“Hope
Smiles from the threshold of the year to come,
Whispering 'it will be happier'...”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“It's not our job to toughen our children up to face a cruel and heartless world. It's our job to raise children who will make the world a little less cruel and heartless.”
― L.R. Knost, Two Thousand Kisses a Day: Gentle Parenting Through the Ages and Stages

“In the sweetness of friendship let there be laughter, and sharing of pleasures. For in the dew of little things, does the heart find its morning and is refreshed.”
― Khalil Gibran, The Prophet

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.”
― John Muir, John of the Mountains: The Unpublished Journals of John Muir

“Your trouble is that reaching final conclusions just isn't your thing. You're afraid the decision you make will deprive you of further choice, so that paralyzes your will.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“Russians are not as gloomy as you seemed to think, after all, Arseny told Ambrogio. Sometimes they are in a good mood. After a horde leaves, for example.”
― Evgenij Vodolazkin, Laurus

“I like the assumption that everyone is trying his best, and we should all just be kind to each other.”
― Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train

“Similarly, when we denigrate our bodies—whether through neglect or staring at our faces and counting up our flaws—we are belittling a sacred site, a worship space more wonderous than the most glorious, ancient cathedral. We are standing before the Grand Canyon or the Sistine Chapel and rolling our eyes.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“But now this taco soup is an anonymous commodity. It arrives on my table seemingly by magic. With this anonymity comes ingratitude—I do not recall those farmers and harvesters to whom I owe a debt of thanks. I do not think of God’s mercy in providing a harvest. And with anonymity and ingratitude comes injustice. Like so much of what we consume in our complicated world of global capitalism and multinational corporations, purchasing this corn and these beans involves me, however unwittingly, in webs of systemic injustice, exploitation, and environmental degradation that I am ignorant about and would likely not consent to. I do not know where the onions in my soup came from or how the workers who harvested them were treated. My leftovers may have been provided by a man whose kids can’t afford lunch today.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“It’s easy to forget that teaching is holy work. We forget that building up the intellect- teaching our children to really think- does not happen by the might of human reason, but rather by the grace of God. On an ordinary day, you and I likely have a set of tasks we've scheduled for our kids. But it's more than math. It's more than history. It's the building up of our children's minds and hearts, and we can only do that if we realize that this is how we thank Him for the graces He so lavishly pours out on us.”
― Sarah Mackenzie, Teaching from Rest: A Homeschooler's Guide to Unshakable Peace

“We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
― C.S. Lewis

“A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.”
― C.S. Lewis

“When the mind, for want of being sufficiently reduced by recollection at our first engaging in devotion, has contracted certain bad habits of wandering and dissipation, they are difficult to overcome, and commonly draw us, even against our wills, to the things of the earth.

I believe one remedy for this is to confess our faults, and to humble ourselves before God. I do not advise you to use multiplicity of words in prayer: many words and long discourses being often the occasions of wandering. Hold yourself in prayer before God, like a dumb or paralytic beggar at a rich man's gate. Let it be your business to keep your mind in the presence of the Lord. If it sometimes wander and withdraw itself from Him, do not much disquiet yourself for that: trouble and disquiet serve rather to distract the mind than to re-collect it: the will must bring it back in tranquility. If you persevere in this manner, God will have pity on you.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

“And the story they tell us is of a world so evil, so shattered and grieved that we wonder how goodness could ever have been. In the shadow sight it sets upon us, we think of things like beauty or hope, story or song as frivolities that only distract us from the single, great reality of our grief.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“I could no more walk away from his existence than I could walk away from my own desire for breath.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“One boy lost his battle there in the forest, but the other took up the fight in his honor, and, in the fierce pain of that memorial, I glimpsed the kind of beauty that is not so much the vision of something good as a defiance of the evil that is all you can see at the moment.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We were not created for disaster nor formed for destruction, and to lament our pain is to honor the beauty God intended and yearn toward its restoration.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“The only possible defence for God against the charge of making a world riddled with suffering and violence is that He didn't,’ writes my Oxford tutor, Michael Lloyd.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“Our humblest moments are the spaces in which God's reign returns to earth, and I believe that the beauty we claim and create in response to that in-breaking life can be a radical defiance of evil. We are called to courageous creation, for the making of beauty is our gentle and holy defiance of the forces of disintegration and the powers of darkness.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We live in an age that further drains and complicates our relationship with time by making our lives a ceaseless round of unbounded activity. In the modern world, we are increasingly less cognizant of the ancient rhythms of day and night, star and season, and less aware of the way those cadences influence our bodies and minds and allow us the boundaries of rest we need for healing. Electricity means we can banish the shadows and extend our days almost indefinitely. Insulated as we are by technologies of all sorts, caught up in the world of our screens, we are no longer as aware of cold and heat, summer and winter as a repeating symphony that reflects the real seasons of our own bodies and souls.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“We are called to faithfulness, to lives whose soil becomes the place where the stories of others are rooted. We are members one of another, and the way we deal with our sorrow and claim our hope will become the soil for the stories of our children and our spouses, our neighbors and our friends.”
― Sarah Clarkson, This Beautiful Truth: How God's Goodness Breaks into Our Darkness

“This is why we are restless in heart and soul: we seek our rest in things that are so trivial, in which there is no rest, instead of seeking to know God who is all-powerful, totally wise and good. God alone is true rest.”
― Mother Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Julian of Norwich [Hodder & Stoughton, 2010] (Paperback) [Paperback]

“God is very pleased when we continually search for him. We cannot do more than seed, suffer and trust and this itself is the work of the Holy Spirit in the soul.”
― Mother Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Julian of Norwich [Hodder & Stoughton, 2010] (Paperback) [Paperback]

“As we seek God it is his will that we do three things: first, that by his grace we apply ourselves seriously to the task of seeking him and not in a lethargic way, not weighed down by unnecessary heaviness and useless depression. Second, that to the end of our lives we resolutely wait for him, out of love for him, without grumbling or pulling against him, for this life is so short anyway. Third, that we trust him utterly out of complete faith in him. For he wants us to know that he will appear unexpectedly, bringing perfect happiness to all who love him.”
― Mother Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Julian of Norwich [Hodder & Stoughton, 2010] (Paperback) [Paperback]

“We were the way we were; nothing could make us any different, and we suffered because of it. Things happened to us the way they did because we were ourselves.”
― Wendell Berry, Nathan Coulter

“The best thing for being sad . . . is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting.”
― T.H. White, The Sword in the Stone

“Nothing puts things in perspective as quickly as a mountain.”
― Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

“When judgment is announced and we are all taken up above, we shall clearly see in God, the secret things which are now hidden from us. Then none of us will have the slightest urge to say, 'Lord, if it had been like this, then it would have been fine.' Instead, we shall all say, with one voice; 'We praise you, Lord, because it is like this: all is well. Now we can really see that everything has been done just as you planned it before anything was made.”
― Mother Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love by Mother Julian of Norwich [Hodder & Stoughton, 2010] (Paperback) [Paperback]

“In this book, I want to explore what it looks like for an ordinary person to choose the radical way of quiet. To slow slowly (and often with great difficulty) choose the patterns and ways of hush rather than a hurry or information. To open days with prayer or a moment of stillness instead of a quick scroll on a screen. To turn, in grief or fear, to the inner refuge of God's presence rather than Google.”
― Sarah Clarkson, Reclaiming Quiet: Cultivating a Life of Holy Attention