"Mercy understands the why behind the what. Legalism only looks at what people do. God looks beyond what people do to why we do it and that's why He can be so patient and long-suffering with us and work with us toward our healing," Joyce Meyer

Tolerance

"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together," Vincent van Gogh

Lord Byron

"Always laugh when you can, it is cheap medicine."

 "If I don't write to empty my mind, I go mad. Mad, bad and dangerous to know."

Richard Burton

"The squalor of the latest Election campaign in the States has to be read to be disbelieved," Richard Burton, 1968. (Could apply any time, don't you think?)

Thomas Sowell

Change

“When you are through changing, you are through," Bruce Barton

Seeing

"A man only sees clearly through his heart," Andrea Bocelli

Photo credit: http://www.andreabocelli.com/en/#!/biography

 

Love

About Government

"The budget should be balanced, the treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed, lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work instead of living on public assistance," Cicero, 55 BC

"You can't make socialists out of individuals--children who know how to think for themselves spoil the harmony of the collective society which is coming, where everyone is interdependent," John Dewey, a founder of the philosophical school of Pragmatism and leader in the Progressive Movement in American education

Art

The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize. (Who said this?)

  “If you find yourself asking yourself (and your friends), "Am I really a writer? Am I really an artist?" chances are you are. The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death." 
Steven Pressfield, The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles

George Washington

Albert Einstein

"...science without religion is lame,

religion without science is blind."

Jesus

C.S. Lewis

“[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.”
― C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

 

 

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense." 

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reinhard Bonnke

The Cross stands fast. It is an anchor of the soul. That figure of speech is found in the book of Hebrews 6:19-20. "This {hope} we have as an anchor of the soul, both sure and steadfast, and which enters the Presence {behind} the veil, where the forerunner has entered for us, {even} Jesus..." This is a sea-going picture from those ancient days. A ship comes into harbor, but cannot draw too near to the shore in the darkness. So a sailor gets into a boat with an anchor and a line attached which is also fixed to the ship. He is called the "fore runner". As he rows, the line between anchor and ship is played out and links them. Eventually the forerunner boat arrives and the seaman carries the anchor ashore and secures it on land. In the morning, no sails are needed. The crew of the ship begins to wind in the anchor cable yet it isn't the anchor which moves but the ship. Slowly the vessel winches towards the shore. This is the background to the word "forerunner". Our "forerunner" is Jesus who has entered through the veil and our anchor is made fast. Our salvation is secure like the sailor ashore whom the crew cannot see. Christ is no longer visible to us, He is "ashore" in glory, and WE ARE ATTACHED BY FAITH TO GLORY BY HIM. He has entered glory for us. Day by day the cable is shortening, and pulling us nearer and nearer to Christ our forerunner. Eventually we shall reach heaven's shore and what shall we see? Our "forerunner" waiting to greet us, that "where He is there we may also be." Faith links us already, and will bring us to Him at last. THAT FAITH IS ASSURANCE. Blessed?  

 

Possessions on their own are a half-life, which is the area catered for in the shopping malls. For the other half we must take our basket to another street. We don't live by bread but by supreme love, friendship, romance and joy in God, meeting Him. As Wesley sang, 'Thou O Christ art all I want, more than all in thee I find.' Indeed, God draws close to those who believe, the Creator to His creatures. He touches their spirit, depth calling to depth in worship and gladness. Our spirit soars as we unzip our soul and 'let ourselves go' in the rapture of adoration. 'Bless the Lord O my soul and all that is within me, bless and praise His holy name!' says the writer of Psalm 103. That's what faith is for--life, not just for working miracles. Faith flings open the door of heaven and its Divine orchestras fill us with music. Jesus referred to believers as those 'who understand with the heart,' and said, 'Blessed are your eyes because they see,' Matthew 13:15 & 16.

Faith has neither bulk nor weight, for it is what you do. Jesus spoke of “faith as small as a mustard seed” (Luke 17:6), referring to something tiny with huge potential. Perhaps today Jesus might speak of faith as a fuse. Tiny as it is, it transmits the awesome power generated in power stations to our homes. Without it, every appliance is useless, unable to draw from that power. As believers, we know what we believe and Who we believe. Believing tests us. Taking God’s Word at face value, accepting its divine authority, we plug into the very power-source! Faith is the vital link. By it, the energies of heaven flow into the world. The greatness of God, of the work of Christ, of the Word of God is all there, but without faith, as small as a fuse wire, none of that greatness avails. The circuit is broken. And once connected, the fuse itself cannot help but show the effects of the power surging through it. It warms up! Faith makes us dynamic, exuberant, excited! “Have faith in God”. 

 

Islam

"Allah did not create man so that he could have fun. The aim of creation was for mankind to be put to the test through hardship and prayer. An Islamic regime must be serious in every field. There are no jokes in Islam. There is no humor in Islam. There is no fun in Islam. There can be no fun and joy in whatever is serious," Ayatollah Khomeini

Penn Jillette

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Dr. Seuss

Paradox

"Christianity got over the difficulty of combining furious opposites by keeping them both and keeping them both furious," G. K. Chesterton

"If one wishes to eliminate uncertainty, tension, confusion and disorder from one's life, there's no point in getting mixed up with either Yahweh or with Jesus of Nazareth," Andrew Greeley

"Truth is not in the middle, and not in one extreme, but in both extremes," Charles Simeon 

About God

"The greatest proof that the Bible is inspired 
is that it has stood so much bad preaching," 
A.T. Robertson 

 

Forgiveness

Mother Teresa

"Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty," Mother Teresa

Philip Yancey Quotes

"Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived."

Kindness

Abraham Lincoln

"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong."

Words

“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter – it's the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning," Mark Twain, 1888

“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for," Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 1953

"...wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words," Dorothy Parker, interview in Paris Review, 1956

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink," George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

 

“Write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs. The adjective hasn't been built that can pull a weak or inaccurate noun out of a tight place," William Strunk and E.B. White, The Elements of Style, 1959

"The road to hell is paved with adverbs." – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000

“A kiss is a lovely trick, designed by nature, to stop speech when words become superfluous," Ingrid Bergman

Writing

 There are only two types of stories: the ones where the characters begin unhappy and end happy, which are the ones that sell, and the ones where the characters begin happy and end unhappy, which are the ones English majors read. (attribution unknown)

"I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit," Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft 

Stephen King's web site

Happiness

"Don't cry because it's over, smile because it happened," Dr. Seuss

Invention

“Invention is about formulating the right question to ask,” Steve Perlman

“Invention makes the impossible possible,” Steve Perlman

Science

“Scientists are slowly waking up to an inconvenient truth - the universe looks suspiciously like a fix. The issue concerns the very laws of nature themselves. For 40 years, physicists and cosmologists have been quietly collecting examples of all too convenient "coincidences" and special features in the underlying laws of the universe that seem to be necessary in order for life, and hence conscious beings, to exist. Change any one of them and the consequences would be lethal. Fred Hoyle, the distinguished cosmologist, once said it was as if "a super-intellect has monkeyed with physics".


To see the problem, imagine playing God with the cosmos. Before you is a designer machine that lets you tinker with the basics of physics. Twiddle this knob and you make all electrons a bit lighter, twiddle that one and you make gravity a bit stronger, and so on. It happens that you need to set thirtysomething knobs to fully describe the world about us. The crucial point is that some of those metaphorical knobs must be tuned very precisely, or the universe would be sterile.


Example: neutrons are just a tad heavier than protons. If it were the other way around, atoms couldn't exist, because all the protons in the universe would have decayed into neutrons shortly after the big bang. No protons, then no atomic nucleuses and no atoms. No atoms, no chemistry, no life. Like Baby Bear's porridge in the story of Goldilocks, the universe seems to be just right for life.”

― Paul Davies

Check out Mr. Davies site

“The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.” 

William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering The Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

 

Winston Churchill

"The only statistics you can trust are those you falsified yourself."


"The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."


"Definition of a politician: he is asked to stand, he wants to sit, he is expected to lie."


A female admirer quipped, "Doest it thrill you...to know that every time you make a speech the hall is packed to overflowing?" Churchill replied, "It is quite flattering, but whenever I feel this way I always remember that if instead of making a political speech I was being hanged, the crowd would be twice as big."


"It is a great mistake to suppose that thrift is caused only by fear; it springs from hope as well as from fear; where there is no hope, be sure there will be no thrift."


"If you destroy a free market you create a black market."


"Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few are those who see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon."

"You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill

"Men stumble over the truth from time to time,
but most pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened."
– Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)