 |
||
|
|
WORTH REPEATING Sometimes, somewhere, someone says it just right! We feel better already, knowing someone has put our thoughts into words.
FAMILY Sometimes people can hunger for more than bread. It is possible that our children, our husband, our wife, do not hunger for bread, do not need clothes, do not lack a house. But are we equally sure that none of them feels alone, abandoned, neglected, needing some affection? That, too, is poverty. --Mother Teresa If you don't know [your family's] history, then you don't know anything. You are a leaf that doesn't know it is a part of a tree. --Michael Crichton Govern a family as you would cook a small fish - very gently. --Chinese Proverb To put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right. --Confucius Peace and war begin at home. If we truly want peace in the world, let us begin by loving one another in our own families. If we want to spread joy, we need for every family to have joy. --Mother Teresa MARRIAGE Ages of experience have taught humanity that the commitment of a husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society. --Jonathan Rausch (F)eminists' ideological effort to free women from families rather than strengthen their ties to them reveals a breathtaking disregard for the principal cause of poor women's poverty. --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese A sound marriage is not based on complete frankness; it is based on a sensible reticence. --Morris L. Ernst A great marriage is not when the 'perfect couple' come together. It is when an imperfect couple learns to enjoy their differences. --Dave Meurer Marriage is more than a private emotional relationship. It is also a social good. Not every person can or should marry. And not every child raised outside of marriage is damaged as a result. But communities where good-enough marriages are common have better outcomes for children, women, and men than do communities suffering from high rates of divorce, unmarried childbearing, and high-conflict or violent marriages. --Why Marriage Matters, A Report from Family Scholars CHILDREN Though in our time motherhood has been greatly devalued, and the sick phrase 'unwanted child' been given currency, it still remains true, as any nurse or gynaecologist will confirm, that it is extremely rare for any child at the moment of birth to be other than wanted in its mother's eyes. --Malcolm Muggeridge The cavalier manner in which our society treats child care, not as a matter of intimacy and love, but as a matter of convenience and economics, is deeply destructive to our children's sense of attachment, identity, and importance. --Dr. Laura Schlessinger When motherhood is demoted from the center of women's lives to a parenthesis, children are demoted as well. --Elizabeth Fox-Genovese What children need is the touching, holding, cooing, rocking, and stimulation that come traditionally from a mother.....Attention is the greatest gift that parents can bestow. --Mortimer Zuckerman Learning from their children is the best opportunity most people have to assure themselves of a meaningful old age. --M. Scott Peck LOVE The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. -- G.K. Chesterton The best portion of a good man's life is the little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love." --William Wordsworth True love causes pain. Jesus, in order to give us the proof of his love, died on the cross. A mother, in order to give birth to her baby, has to suffer. If you really love one another, you will not be able to avoid making sacrifices. --Mother Teresa In our society love is a feeling word with its power usually described in passive terms….love is something that happens to us over which we have no control….We are victims of its irresistible force....In biblical categories, love functions more as a verb than as a noun. It is concerned more with doing than with feelings; it is defined by action. Love may or may not include warm feelings of affection. When affection is present, that is a bonus, but love can perform without those feelings. --R. C. Sproul Love begins at home. If we do not love one another who we see 24 hours, how can we love those we see only once? We show love by thoughtfulness, by kindness, by sharing joy, by sharing a smile...through the little things. --Mother Teresa True love is not a feeling by which we are overwhelmed. It is a committed, thoughtful decision. --M. Scott Peck Love cannot remain by itself--it has no meaning. Love has to be put into action and that action is service. --Mother Teresa SEX Of all the misconceptions about love the most powerful and pervasive is the belief that 'falling in love' is love....But two problems are immediately apparent. The first is that the experience of falling in love is specifically a sex-linked erotic experience...We fall in love only when we are consciously or unconsciously sexually motivated. The second problem is that the experience of falling in love is invariably temporary....the feeling of ecstatic lovingness that characterizes the experience of falling in love always passes. --M. Scott Peck I remember the challenge from one female teen on my radio program who demanded to know, 'Why can't I have sex in a casual way with a number of people if it feels good? My mother couldn't give me any good reason.' But, I asked, can you feel really good if you know that ultimately nobody cares about you, nor you about them, much at all? Isn't that a lonely thought--a lonely feeling? She quietly said, 'Yes.' --Dr. Laura Schlessinger Sex does not give women power over men. So why do so many behave as if it does? We think if we can give a man what he wants in the bedroom, all the rest will follow. I'm assuming that men invented this lie, since it serves their purposes so well and ours so poorly. --Judge Judy Scheindlin EDUCATION In proportion as the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential that public opinion should be enlightened. -George Washington For the educational system to be of value to your children, you have to teach your children respect, hard work, and good values, in a milieu of love, affection, and discipline. --Dr. Laura Schlessinger It should be the highest ambition of every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn. –George Washington LIFE I rejoice over the new remedies for sleeping sickness, which enable me to preserve life, where once I could only witness the progress of a painful disease. But every time I put the germs that cause the disease under the microscope I cannot but reflect that I have to sacrifice this life in order to save another. -Albert Schweitzer Standing, as all living beings are, before this dilemma of the will to live, man is constantly forced to preserve his own life and life in general only at the cost of other life. It he has been touched by the ethic of Reverence for Life, he injures and destroys life only under a necessity he cannot avoid, and never from thoughtlessness. -Albert Schweitzer Affirmation of life is the spiritual act by which man ceases to live thoughtlessly and begins to devote himself to his life with reverence in order to give it true value. To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live. At the same time the man who has become a thinking being feels a compulsion to give to every will to live the same reverence for life that he gives to his own. He experiences that other life in his own. He accepts as good preserving life, promoting life, developing all life that is capable of development to its highest possible value. He considers as evil destroying life, injuring life, repressing life that is capable of development. This is the absolute, fundamental principle of ethics, and it is a fundamental postulate of thought. -Albert Schweitzer FAITH My life only makes any sense when I include the spiritual dimension. The events that produce genuine change or meaningful success always involve a dimension that is beyond the obvious political, social, or personal forces. Something extra pulls all these energies and insights together creating something greater than the sum of its parts. –Andrew Young Deep within us all there is an amazing inner sanctuary of the soul, a holy place, a Divine Center, a speaking Voice, to which we may continuously return. Eternity is at our hearts pressing upon our time-worn lives, warming us with intimations of an astounding destiny, calling us home unto Itself. -Thomas Kelly, Pennsylvania Quaker It is profoundly significant that whenever we hear the sayings of Jesus we have to enter a realm of thought that is not our own. Our own affirmative attitude toward the world and toward life constantly threatens to externalize Christianity. -Albert Schweitzer There are a good many problems before the American people today, and before me as President, but I expect to find the solution to those problems just in the proportion that I am faithful in the study of the Word of God. – President Woodrow Wilson Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. The labor of obedience will bring you back to him from whom you had drifted through the sloth of disobedience. This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. Prologue, Rule of Saint Benedict When I left the house of bondage, I left everything behind. I wanted to keep nothing of Egypt on me, and so I went to the Lord and asked him to give me a new name.... I set up my banner, and... sing, and then folks always comes up 'round me, and... I tells them about Jesus. -Sojourner Truth The genius of Christianity is to have proclaimed that the path of the deepest mystery is the path of love. -Andre Malraux, 1967
One cannot be exposed to the law and order of
the universe without concluding that there must be design and purpose
behind it all . . . (T)he better we understand the Suddenly, at the top of Kings Mountain, my whole life began anew….Until that moment on the mountaintop, I had lived my life simply as the child of my parents. I realized then that I didn’t belong to my parents, nor did I belong to myself. I belonged to something or someone beyond me—the Creator. -Andrew Young The fruit of prayer is a deepening of faith. And the fruit of faith is love. And the fruit of love is service. --Mother Teresa TRUTH There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily. -George Washington But speaking the truth in love is the only way to approach the problems of injustice nonviolently. And when the truth is spoken without judgment, but rather to point to the possibility of a “more excellent way” of living together as brothers and sisters in spite of the differences of race, class, or creed, there is the possibility of anyone accepting the potential of a new start. This is the way God deals with us as his children, and it is also the way that we must learn to deal with each other. -Andrew Young Since the essential nature of the spiritual is truth, every new truth represents a gain. Truth is under all circumstances more valuable than nontruth, and this must apply to truth in the realm of history as well as to other kinds of truth. Even if it comes in a guise that piety finds strange and which at first creates difficulties, the final result can never be harmful. It can only mean a deeper piety. Religion has, therefore, nothing to fear from a confrontation with historical truth. -Albert Schweitzer You will find that the truth is often unpopular and the contest between agreeable fancy and disagreeable fact is unequal. For, in the vernacular, we Americans are suckers for good news. -Adlai E. Stevenson Light and Truth are synonyms for God. As potentially godly creatures, we are called to face ourselves and expose our Shadows, individual and collective to the light. We are called to consciousness. God does not desire us to be in the dark or to attempt to keep others there. We are called to genuine civility as opposed to the pretense of politeness. Like medicine, like surgery, the truth may hurt, but in the long run...it is always healing. -M. Scott Peck For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suite their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry. --St. Paul (2Tim 4:3-4 NIV) WISDOM We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others. -Blaise Pascal By itself the affirmation of life can only produce a partial and imperfect civilization. Only if it turns inward and becomes ethical can the will to progress attain the ability to distinguish the valuable from the worthless. We must therefore strive for a civilization that is not based on the accretion of science and power alone, but which cares most of all for the spiritual and ethical development of the individual and of humankind. -Albert Schweitzer The right thing to do never requires any subterfuge; it is always simple and direct. -Calvin Coolidge INTEGRITY Only the man who follows the command of Jesus single-mindedly, and unresistingly lets his yoke rest upon him, finds his burden easy, and under its gentle pressure receives the power to persevere in the right way. The command of Jesus is hard, unutterably hard for those who try to resist it. But for those who willingly submit, the yoke is easy, and the burden is light. ‘His commandments are not grievous’ (IJohn5:3). The commandment of Jesus is not a sort of spiritual shock treatment. Jesus asks nothing of us without giving us the strength to perform it. His commandment never seeks to destroy life, but to foster, strengthen and heal it. -Dietrich Bonhoeffer Until now the great weakness in all ethical systems has been that they dealt only with the relations of man to man. In reality, however, the question is, What is our attitude toward the universe and all that it supports? A man is ethical only when life as such is sacred to him—the life of plants and animals as well as that of his fellow men—and when he devotes himself to helping all life that is in need of help. -Albert Schweitzer In order to be Christians, we should resemble Christ, of this I am firmly convinced. Gandhi once said that if Christians lived according to their faith, there would be no more Hindus left in India. People expect us to be consistent with our Christian life. -Mother Teresa ************
All content copyright 2007 ForTruth, Inc. All Rights Reserved. |