Beate

“Today we honor a great statesman who, with foresight and skill, gave our country perspective and stability after the failure of the Weimar Republic and the horrors of National Socialism. We bow to Konrad Adenauer with great gratitude. We also take his merit as an obligation for our tasks in a confusing, difficult world. In view of what Konrad Adenauer and his contemporaries have achieved, we should have the courage to continue this work.[83]”
― Henry Kissinger, Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy

“there are moral truths, grounded in the distinctive nature of our species—in facts about what human beings need if they are going to thrive. They drew on neglected ancient resources—Plato, and especially Aristotle—but also on Charles Darwin and Jane Goodall, to explain how we are less exceptional than we imagine, and more at home in the world.”
― Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb, The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

“The Word is living, being, spirit, all verdant greening, all creativity. This Word manifests itself in every creature. —Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179)”
― Bonnie Smith Whitehouse, Seasons of Wonder: Making the Ordinary Sacred Through Projects, Prayers, Reflections, and Rituals: A 52-week devotional

“Do you suppose it ever occurs to an angel to worry because he is not an archangel? or to think that if he works a little harder or makes the right angelic friends he’ll get elevated in the heavenly hierarchy? That’s nonsense. My guardian angel is equal, as far as rank goes, to any archangel. It’s we earthlings who’ve lost sight of the fact that it’s a difference in kind, not in degree. And anyhow it doesn’t matter, because my guardian angel is fully what he is, performing wholly the function for which God has created him. At the moment, this function is to watch over me. After I die, he might be assigned to sweeping stardust out of a corner of the sky. But because he is doing what he is created to do, radiantly, joyfully, no matter how difficult I make it for him, I can catch some of his joy. Without my angel’s joy, where would I be?”)”
― Madeleine L'Engle, The Novels of Madeleine L'Engle Volume One: The Other Side of the Sun, A Live Coal in the Sea, and A Winter's Love