Mary Yerkes > Mary's Quotes

“Yes, I think it's okay to abandon the big, established, stuck tribe. It's okay to say to them, "You're not going where I need to go, and there's no way I'm going to persuade all of you to follow me. So rather than standing here watching the opportunities fade away, I'm heading off. I'm betting some of you, the best of you, will follow me.”
― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

“Remarkable visions and genuine insights are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance. Products, services, career paths - whatever it is, the forces for mediocrity will align to stop you, forgiving no errors and never backing down until it's over. If it were any other way, it would be easy. And if it were any other way, everyone would do it and your work would ultimately be devalued. The yin and yang are clear: without people pushing against your quest to do something worth talking about, it's unlikely to be worth the journey. Persist.”
― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

“The secret of being wrong isn't to avoid being wrong! The secret is being willing to be wrong. The secret is realizing that wrong isn't fatal. The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success.”
― Seth Godin, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us

“Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often given a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of "Christian" countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else-and often more so, I'm afraid.”
― Richard Rohr, Breathing Underwater: Spirituality and the 12 Steps

“Before the truth sets you free, it tends to make you miserable.”
― Richard Rohr, Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life

“The man who is wise, therefore, will see his life as more like a reservoir than a canal. The canal simultaneously pours out what it receives; the reservoir retains the water till it is filled, then discharges the overflow without loss to itself ... Today there are many in the Church who act like canals, the reservoirs are far too rare ... You too must learn to await this fullness before pouring out your gifts, do not try to be more generous than God.”
― Bernard of Clairvaux, Bernard of Clairvaux on the Song of Songs III

“If you are too busy to read, you are too busy.”
― Richard J. Foster, Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World

“Thinking is the hardest work we can do, and among the most important”
― Richard J. Foster, Freedom of Simplicity: Finding Harmony in a Complex World

“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“Not forgiving is like drinking rat poison and then waiting for the rat to die.”
― Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith