When you talk you only repeat what you know, but if you listen you may learn something. Amish school proverb

Wherever riches have increased, the essence of religion has decreased in the same proportion. Therefore I do not see how it is possible in the nature of things for any revival of religion to continue long. For religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, anger, and love of the world in all its branches.

John Wesley unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Man is bored, because he is too big to be happy with that which sin is giving him.  God has made him too great, his potential is too mighty.

A.W. Tozer Who Put Jesus on the Cross, August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


To give and not to count the cost; To fight and not to heed the wounds; To toil and not to seek for rest; To labour and not ask for any reward Save that of knowing that we do Thy will.

St. Ignatius of Loyola Spiritual Exercises August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me.

John Wesley unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The New Christian is like a man who has learned to drive a car in a country where the traffic moves on the left side of the highway and suddenly finds himself in another country and forced to drive on the right.  He must unlearn his old habit and learn a new one and more serious than all, he must learn in heavy traffic."

A.W. Tozer Of God and Men August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


This is what I believe: That I am I. That my soul is a dark forest. That my known self will never be more than a little clearing in the forest. That gods, strange gods, come forth from the forest into the clearing of my known self, and then go back. That I must have the courage to let them come and go. That I will never let mankind put anything over me, but that I will try always to recognize and submit to the gods in me and the gods in other men and women. There is my creed.

D. H. Lawrence  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Catch on fire with enthusiasm and people will come for miles to watch you burn.

John Wesley unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Christianity today is man-centered, not God-centered.  God is made to wait patiently, even respectfully, on the whims of men.  The image of God currently popular is that of a distracted Father, struggling in heartbroken desperation to get people to accept a Saviour of whom they feel no need and in whom they have very little interest.  To persuade these self-sufficent souls to respond to His generous offers God will do almost anything, even using salesmanship methods and talking down to them in the chummiest way imaginable.  This view of things is, of course, a kind of religious romanticism which, while it often uses flattering and sometimes embarrasing terms in praise of God, manages nevertheless to make man the star of the show.

A.W. Tozer Man: The Dwelling Place of God August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Beth could not reason upon or explain the faith that gave her courage and patience to give up life, and cheerfully wait for death. Like a confiding child, she asked no questions, but left everything to God and nature, Father and Mother of us all, feeling sure that they, and they only, could teach and strengthen heart and spirit for this life and the life to come.

Louisa May Alcott,faith, Little Women December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.

John Wesley  August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


We are called to an everlasting preoccupation with God

A.W. Tozer The Incredible Christian August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Pray as if everything depended on God and act as if everything depended on oneself.

St Ignatius of Loyola Spiritual Exercises August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


When I have money, I get rid of it quickly, lest it find a way into my heart.

John Wesley unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Whatever a man wants badly and persistently enough will determine the man's character."

A.W. Tozer The Root of the Righteous August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


A person will worship something, have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts, but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and our character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, worship,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame, if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

John Wesley unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Worship means "to feel in the heart"....Worship also means to "express in some appropriate manner" what you feel....and what will be expressed?  "A humbling but delightful sense of admiring awe and astonished wonder".

A.W. Tozer Worship The Missing Jewel of the Evangelical Church August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.

St. Augustine  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


We must do something about the cross, and one of two things only we can do--flee it or die upon it

A.W. Tozer The Root of the Righteous August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Let me look at the foulness and ugliness of my body. Let me see myself as an ulcerous sore running with every horrible and disgusting poison.

St. Ignatius of Loyola Spiritual Exercises August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The only fear I have is to fear to get out of the will of God.  Outside of the will of God, there's nothing I want, and in the will of God there's nothing I fear, for God has sworn to keep me in His will. If I'm out of his will that's another matter. But if I'm in His will, He's sworn to keep me."

A.W. Tozer Success and the Christian August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Reinhold Niebuhr: Nothing worth doing is completed in our lifetime, Therefore, we are saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; Therefore, we are saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone. Therefore, we are saved by love. No virtuous act is quite a virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own; Therefore, we are saved by the final form of love which is forgiveness.

Reinhold Niebuhr  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


We must face today as children of tomorrow.  We must meet the uncertainties of this world with the certainty of the world to come."

A.W. Tozer Of God and Men August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.

Helen Keller  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


What does this word holiness really mean? Is it a negative kind of piety from which so many people have shied away? No, of course not! Holiness in the Bible means moral wholeness-- a positive quality which actually includes kindness, mercy, purity, moral blamelessness and godliness. It is always to be thought of in a positive, white intensity of degree."

A.W. Tozer I Call it Heresy August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Scientists were rated as great heretics by the church, but they were truly religious men because of their faith in the orderliness of the universe.

Albert Einstein  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


After the Bible the next most valuable book for the Christian is a good hymnal.  Let any young Christian spend a year prayerfully meditating on the hymns of Watts and Wesley alone and he will become a fine theologian.  Then let him read a balanced diet of the Puritans and the Christian mystics.  The results will be more wonderful than he could have dreamed."

A.W. Tozer Man: The Dwelling Place of God August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Nine requisites for contented living: Health enough to make work a pleasure. Wealth enough to support your needs. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor. Love enough to move you to be useful and helpful to others. Faith enough to make real the things of God. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future. (1749-1832)

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


think that most Christians would be better pleased if the Lord did not inquire into their personal affairs too closely.  They want Him to save them, keep them happy and take them to heaven at last, but not to be too inquisitive about their conduct or service.  But He has searched us and known us;  He knows our downsitting and our uprising and understands our thoughts afar off.  There is no place to hide from those eyes that are as a flame of fire and there is no way to escape from the Judgment of those feet that are like fine brass.  It is the part of wisdom to live with these things in mind." 

A.W. Tozer That Incredible Christian August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible. (1225-1274)

St. Thomas  Aquinas  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


When I am praying the most eloquently, I am getting the least accomplished in my prayer life.  But when I stop getting eloquent and give God less theology and shut up and just gaze upward and wait for God to speak to my heart He speaks with such power that I have to grab a pencil and a notebook and take notes on what God is saying to my heart.

A.W. Tozer Success and the Christian August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.

Albert Einstein, WONDER,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


We need to improve the quality of our Christianity and we never will until we raise our concept of God back to that held by apostle, sage, prophet, saint and reformer. When we put God back where he really belongs, we will instinctively and automatically move up again; the whole spiral of our religious direction will be upward."

A.W. Tozer The Attributes of God August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Beware the man of one book

St. Thomas Aquinas  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


We may as well face it: the whole level of spirituality among us is low.  We have measured ourselves by ourselves until the incentive to seek higher plateaus in the things of the Spirit is all but gone."

A.W. Tozer Of God and Men August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


If we could see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.

 Buddha, WONDER,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


For a long time I have believed that truth, to be understood must be lived; that Bible doctrine is wholly ineffective until it has been digested and assimilated by the total life. 

A.W. Tozer That Incredible Christian August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Because philosophy arises from awe, a philosopher is bound in his way to be a lover of myths and poetic fables. Poets and philosophers are alike in being big with wonder.

St. Thomas Aquinas  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


People usually consider walking on water or in thin air a miracle. But I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air, but to walk on earth. Every day we are engaged in a miracle which we don't even recognize: a blue sky, white clouds, green leaves, the black, curious eyes of a child -- our own two eyes. All is a miracle.

Thich Nhat Hanh  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Before the ice is in the pools, Before the skaters go, Or any cheek at nightfall Is tarnished by the snow, Before the fields have finished, Before the Christmas tree, Wonder upon wonder Will arrive to me!

Emily Dickenson, Christmas,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


It is not because the truth is too difficult to see that we make mistakes... we make mistakes because the easiest and most comfortable course for us is to seek insight where it accords with our emotions - especially selfish ones.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, TRUTH,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


In religion and politics people's beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing.

Mark Twain, belief, Autobiography December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

Blaise Pascal, faith,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


There is scarcely anything so dull and meaningless as Bible doctrine taught for its own sake.  Truth divorced from life is not truth in its Biblical sense, but something else and something less."

A.W. Tozer Of God and Men August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.

Henry L. Mencken  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


We have become so engrossed in the work of the Lord that we have forgotten the Lord of the work.

A.W. Tozer The Banner December 4th, 1970
 
 

 


By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher.

Socrates , marriage,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


no religion has ever been greater than its idea of God.  Worship is pure or base as the worshiper entertains high or low thoughts of God."

A.W. Tozer The Knowledge of the Holy August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.

St. Thomas Aquinas Two Precepts of Charity December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


It all began with Adam. He was the first man to tell a joke--or a lie. How lucky Adam was. He knew when he said a good thing, nobody had said it before. Adam was not alone in the Garden of Eden, however, and does not deserve all the credit; much is due to Eve, the first woman, and Satan, the first consultant. 1867

Mark Twain Notebook December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Men who refuse to worship the true God now worship themselves with tender devotion.

A.W. Tozer The Divine Conquest August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The Universe has as many different centers as there are living beings in it

Alexander Solzhenitsyn  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Now, worship is the missing jewel in modern evangelicalism. We're organized; we work; we have our agendas. We have almost everything, but there's one thing that the churches, even the gospel churches, do not have: that is the ability to worship. We are not cultivating the art of worship.

A.W. Tozer Worship: The Missing Jewel August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


 Christianity takes for granted the absence of any self-help and offers a power which is nothing less than the power of God.

A.W. Tozer unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The highest manifestation of life consists in this: that a being governs its own actions. A thing which is always subject to the direction of another is somewhat of a dead thing.

St. Thomas Aquinas  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Remember what is unbecoming to do is also unbecoming to speak of.

Socrates   December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


An infinite God can give all of Himself to each of His children. He does not distribute Himself that each may have a part, but to each one He gives all of Himself as fully as if there were no others.

A.W. Tozer unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Own only what you can carry with you; know language, know countries, know people. Let your memory be your travel bag.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, posessions,  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organizations do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always.

A.W. Tozer unknown August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


Whenever I enjoy anything in art it means that it is mighty poor. The private knowledge of this fact has saved me from going to pieces with enthusiasm in front of many and many a chromo.

Mark Twain, art, At the Shrine of St. Wagner December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Refuse to be average. Let your heart soar as high as it will.

A.W. Tozer  August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


The devil is a better theologian than any of us and is a devil still.

A.W. Tozer I Say No to the Devil August 14th, 2004
 
 

 


A person who has for untold centuries maintained the imposing position of spiritual head of four-fifths of the human race, and political head of the whole of it, must be granted the possession of executive abilites of the loftiest order. In his large presence the other popes & politicians shrink to midgets for the microscope. He hasn't a single salaried helper; The Opposition employs a million.

Mark Twain,satan, notebook #42 December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

Thomas Jefferson  December 31st, 1969
 
 

 


Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.

Thomas Jefferson Letter to Connecticut Baptists December 31st, 1969

QotD: "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other." - John Stuart Mill

I will wait here in the fields
to see how well the rain
brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields
longer than a man's life
I am at home. Don't come with me.
You stay home too.

Stay Home by Wendell Barry

QotD: "The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that ain't so." Mark Twain

QOTD: "A meal without wine is a dog's dinner." Ancient Greek saying.

"Orville Wright didn't have a pilot's license." From Orbiting the Giant Hairball: Gordon MacKenzie

Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “If it were only so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” Quoted in Dick Staub's web log.