Grace and Love

"Grace is when you aren't striving or controlling or trying to change or manipulate or make something happen. Grace is when you find yourself carried along, when all that's left to do is receive. Grace is when you know you're loved, exactly as you are. Grace is an entirely different way of experiencing life. Another word for grace is gift."

-Rob Bell, The Zimzum of Love

To Judge

"To judge someone before understanding that person is a form of human rejection and feeds upon itself. It intensifies personal insecurities, necessitating more judgment (prejudice) and less understanding. The processes continue in this vicious cycle."

-Stephen R. Covey, Spiritual Roots of Human Relations

Infinite Distances

"...once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky."

-Rilke

Made of Layers

"We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another, unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made of layers, cells, constellations."

-Anais Nin

Of Monsters

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."

-Nietzsche

Transcendent Love

"By synthesis of all the colors, men can make whiteness, they cannot make light. By synthesis of all the virtues, men can make virtue, they cannot make Love. How then are we to have this transcendent living whole conveyed into our souls? We brace our wills to secure it. We try to copy those who have it. We lay down rules about it. we watch. We pray. But these things alone will not bring Love into our nature. Love is an effect And only as we fulfill the right condition can we have the effect produced. Shall I tell you what the cause is?

Because He first loved us."

-Henry Drummond | The Greatest Thing in the World (1870)

Growing Up Costs the Earth

"Most people don't grow up. It's too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That's the truth of it. They honor credit cards, they find parking spaces. They marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don't grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the Earth, the Earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It's serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. That's what I write. What it really is like. I'm just telling a very simple story."

-Maya Angelou

Faith and Talking to Yourself

"Faith begins with how you talk to yourself."

"Dwelling obsessively on what we do wrong is one of the greatest sources of interference to maximizing our potential."

-Craig Manning, BYU

Beautiful Hurt

"There are a few things in life so beautiful they hurt: swimming in the ocean while it rains, reading alone in empty libraries, the sea of stars that appear when you're miles away from the neon lights of the city, walking in the wilderness, all the phases of the moon, the things we do not know about the universe, and you you."

-Beau Japlin