Favorite Quotes

“To love someone means to see him as God intended him.”
—Fyodor Dostoevsky

“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
—Philo of Alexandria (20BC – AD50)

“It is a fearful thing to hate whom God hath loved. To look upon another—his weaknesses, his sins, his faults, his defects is to look upon one who is suffering. He is suffering from negative passions, from the same sinful human corruption from which you yourself suffer. This is very important: do not look upon him with judgmental eyes of comparison, noting the sins you assume you’d never commit. Rather, see him as a fellow sufferer, a fellow human being who is in need of the very healing of which you are in need. Help him, love him, pray for him do unto him as you would have him do unto you.”
—Attributed to St. Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724 – 1783)

“Any dance of celebration must weave both the sorrows and the blessings into a joyful step….To heal is to let the Holy Spirit call me to dance, to believe again, even amid my pain, that God will orchestrate and guide my life.”
—Henri J.M. Nouwen

“The reason I like to fish is because when everything is calm and quiet, your whole self is full of hoping. And whether you catch anything or not, you still get to hope. It’s a great feeling isn’t it? Hope, I mean. It’s next best to excitement.”
—8 year old Austin Andrews (Son of Andy Andrews)

“Joy is not the absence of suffering, it is the presence of God.”
—Unknown (given to me by my friend Barbara Sorensen)

“Temptation is a suggested short cut to the realization of the highest at which I aim – not towards what I understand as evil, but towards what I understand as good.”
—Oswald Chambers

“Man’s conscience is like an alarm clock. If the alarm goes off, and you get up right away, knowing that you’ve got to go to your obedience, then afterward you’ll always hear it. But if for a few days in a row you don’t get up right away, saying, “I’ll stay in bed a little longer,” then finally, you won’t be awakened by the alarm at all.”
—Elder Joseph of Optina

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
—Abraham Lincoln

“We must not creep along when our souls cry out for us to soar!”
—Helen Keller

“People show their character in nothing more clearly than by what they find laughable.”
—Unknown (I think: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)

“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
—Carl W. Buechner

“The reason people blame things on others is that there’s only one other choice.”
—Doug Larson

“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and you help them to become what they are capable of being.”
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“Preach the Gospel at all times and when necessary use words.”
—St. Francis of Assisi

“Start by doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible.”
—St. Francis of Assisi