Saturday, December 5, 2015

It is the steady and merciless increase of occupations, the augmented speed at which we are always trying to live, the crowding of each day with more work and amusement than it can profitably hold, which has cost us, among other good things, the undisturbed enjoyment of friends.Friendship takes time, and we have no time to give it.

(Agnes Repplier, 1855 - 1950)

Friday, December 4, 2015

Life demands that duality in men and women be freed to function, released from hate or guilt. All wars derive from lack of empathy: the incapacity of one to understand and accept the likeness or difference of another. Whether in nations or the encounters of race and sex, competition then replaces compassion, subjection excludes mutuality... We need each other's qualities if we are ever to understand each other in love and life. The beautiful difference of our biological cells will not diminish through this mutual fusion. It should indeed flower, expand the mind as well as the flesh. When women can cherish the vulnerability of men as much as men can exult in the strength of women, a new breed could lift a ruinous yoke from both. We could breathe free.

(Marya Mannes, 1904 - 1990)

Thursday, December 3, 2015

You are all worked up chasing after this and trying to avoid that. These things are not coming to you, so to speak, but you are going to them. Stop desiring the one and fearing the other, and they will stay where they are, and you will not be seen pursuing of fleeing them.

(Marcus Aurelius, 121 - 180)

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

Autumn makes a double demand. It asks that we prepare for the future - that we be wise in the ways of garnering and keeping. But it also asks that we learn to let go - to acknowledge the beauty of sparseness.

(Bonaro W. Overstreet, 1903 - 1985)

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Idolatry is the practice of ascribing absolute value to things of relative worth. Under certain circumstances money, patriotism, sexual freedom, moral principles, family loyalty, physical health, social or intellectual preeminence, and so on are fine things to have around, but to make them the standard by which all other values are measured, to make them your masters, to look at them to justify your life and save your soul is sheerest folly. They just aren't up to it.

(Frederick Buechner, 1926 -   )

Monday, November 30, 2015

Endurance can be a hard and bitter root in one's life, bearing poisonous and gloomy fruit, destroying of our lives. Endurance is only the beginning. There must be acceptance.

(Pearl S. Buck, 1982 - 1973)

Sunday, Noverber 29, 2015

Do not depend on the hope of results... You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself... You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people... in the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.

(Thomas Merton, 1915 - 1968)