Quotations For The Soul II

Anxiety is the rust of life, destroying its brightness and weakening its power. A childlike and abiding trust in Providence is its best preventive and remedy. ~ Tryon Edwards


One of the hardest lessons we learn in this life, and one that many people never learn, is to see the divine, the celestial, the pure in the common, the near at hand -- to see that heaven lies about us here in this world. ~ John Burroughs


My soul can find no staircase to Heaven unless it be through Earth's loveliness. ~ Michelangelo


Faith strips the mask from the world and reveals God in everything. It makes nothing impossible and renders meaningless such words as anxiety, danger, and fear, so that the believer goes through life calmly and peacefully, with profound joy -- like a child, hand in hand with his mother. ~ Charles De Foucauld


Life, to be happy at all, must be in its way a sacrament, and it is a failure in religion to divorce it from the holy acts of everyday, of ordinary human existence. ~ Freya Stark


As we begin to sense the divine in the 'ordinary', our 'ordinary' lives will become quite extraordinary. ~ Richard Carlson


We are learning from the teaching and example of Jesus that life itself is a religion, that nothing is more sacred than a human being, that the end of all right institutions, whether the home or the church or an educational establishment, or a government, is the development of the human soul. ~ Anna Howard Shaw



Love...puts you in a right relation with God and others, reciprocal rather than heirarchical... But the great commandment is extralegal. Love cannot be forced. It must be chosen. You love not out of dread but out of your own fullness. It's what you were made for. When you fail at it, you aren't sent to prison, or to the electric chair, or to hell. You are commanded again: Love. ~ Nancy Mairs


When half the world is still plagued by terror and distress, you stop guiltily sometimes in the midst of your house-laughter and wonder if you've a right to it. Ought any of us to laugh, until all of us can again, you ask yourself, sometimes. ~ Margaret Lee Runbeck