God's Novel

"Life is God's novel.  Let Him write it."

~ Isaac Bashevis Singer

I'd Rather Learn

"I'd rather learn from one bird how to to sing than to teach ten thousand stars how not to dance."
~ e. e. cummings

Eternal Now

"There is a gust of eternity in every fleeting moment." ~ Marty Rubin

We're all in the same small boat

"Injustice for one is injustice for all."  (Quote by Martin Luther King Jr.? Or Gandhi?)

Hard Choice

It's true we nearly always have a choice, but there's no promise any of the options will be good ones.  Sometimes it's a matter of "would you rather be shot or poisoned"?

Lamott on Truth-Telling

"You own everything that happened to you.  Tell your stories.  If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."  ~ Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions On Writing And Life

Quotes by Type Fours

A Batch of Quotes to be sorted later, all from
Chapter 10 -- Type four: The Individualist of The Wisdom of The Enneagram by Riso and Hudson

"All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique.  All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up."  ~ James Baldwin

"After all, perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent."  ~ Albert Camus

"Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind."  ~ Marcel Proust

"It is better to drink of deep griefs than to taste shallow pleasures." ~  William Hazlitt

"It takes a genius to whine appealingly."  ~  F. Scott Fitzgerald

Love Like Laundry

"You are the dryer-sheet of my heart."
"And you're the lint-trap of my love."
(Sheldon and Amy on The Big Bang Theory)

Forgiveness

"Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."
~ Jesus on the cross (Luke 23:34)

This, maybe more than any other Scripture verse, amazes me and causes me to ponder the profundity of Christ's fathomless mercy.

Picasso on time

It takes a long time to grow young.  -- Pablo Picasso

Merton's Prayer

• "My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."  ~ Thomas Merton

found on Wikiquote

Truth vs Deceit

“Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!” (Is 5:20).

Intuitively Obvious

"The ability to change direction quickly is often mistaken for planning." ~ JPC
If one proceeds down the wrong path, it's possible to recover, especially is you're the only one that knows about it! (again, ~ JPC)

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been... - Elie Wiesel at BrainyQuote

I have not lost faith in God. I have moments of anger and protest. Sometimes I've been... - Elie Wiesel at BrainyQuote

Cross & Kingdom

"The way to the Kingdom is through the Cross" ~ MLHC

C.S. Lewis on Longing for Fulness of Being

What more, you may ask, do we want?  Ah, but we want so much more -- something the books on aesthetics take little notice of.  But the poets and the mythologies know all about it.  We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough.  We want something else which can hardly be put into words -- to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

That is why we have peopled air and earth and water with gods and goddesses and nymphs and elves -- that, though we cannot, yet these projections can, enjoy in themselves that beauty, grace, and power of which Nature is the image.  That is why the poets tell us such lovely falsehoods.  They talk as if the west wind could really sweep into a human soul; but it can't.  They tell us that "beauty born of murmuring sound" will pass into a human face; but it won't.  Or not yet.  For if we take the imagery of Scripture seriously, if we believe that God will one day give us the Morning Star and cause us to put on the splendor of the sun, then we may surmise that both the ancient myths and the modern poetry, so false as history, may be very near the truth as prophecy. 

At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door.  We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure.  We cannot mingle with the splendors we see.  But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumor that it will not always be so.  Some day, God willing, we shall get in.  When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary obedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which nature is only the first sketch. For you must not think that I am putting forward any heathen fancy of being absorbed in Nature.  Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her.  When all the suns and nebula have passed away, each on e of you will still be alive.  Nature is only the image, the symbol; but it it the symbol Scripture invites me to use.  We are summoned to pass in through Nature, beyond her, into that splendor which she fitfully reflects.

~ C. S. Lewis
(found in Maginificat, Vol. 15, No. 9, for Monday, November 18, 2013)

Matisse on Jazz

Jazz is rhythm and meaning

.
~ Henri Matisse

found here

Merton on Christian Love

The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved.  The faith that one is loved by God.  That faith that one is loved by God although unworthy -- or, rather, irrespective of one's worth!  In the true Christian vision of God's love, the idea of worthiness loses its significance.  Revelation of the mercy of God makes the whole problem of worthiness something almost laughable: the discovery that worthiness is of no special consequence (since no-one could ever, by himself, be strictly worthy to be loved with such a love) is a true liberation of the spirit.  And until this discovery is made, until this liberation has been brought about by the divine mercy, man is imprisoned in hate.  

~ Thomas Merton, from New Seeds of Contemplation

Patience

Patience is seeing the Night, and appreciating the Stars, while waiting for the Dawn.

The Spirit Creates

"365 The unity of soul and body is so profound that one has to consider the soul to be the "form" of the body:²³⁴ i.e., it is because of its spiritual soul that the body made of matter becomes a living, human body; spirit and matter, in man, are not two natures united, but rather their union forms a single nature.
366 The Church teaches that every spiritual soul is created immediately by God - it is not "produced" by the parents - and also that it is immortal: it does not perish when it separates from the body at death, and it will be reunited with the body at the final Resurrection.<sup>235"

~ Catechism of the Catholic Church

ML's commentary:  In plain language:  Spirit precedes matter; in fact it is the Spirit that generates all reality.</sup>