• If I am to follow Jesus, then I, too, must remain close to the soil. Often I look up into the clouds and daydream about a better world. But my dreams will never bear fruit unless I keep turning my eyes again and again back to the dust of this earth and listening to what God is saying to me on the road of life. For I am connected to the earth and to all who walk the earth with me.

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

  • “If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charitable expenditure excludes them.”

    — C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

  • “But if the future is not in my hands, then I have all the more reason to stay in the present.”

    —Henri Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

  • It’s not a brand that creates marketing-driven products. It has never advertised because it doesn’t need to: advertising exists to create imagined value, to imbue a product or a brand with a quality that isn’t really there. It’s a socially-acceptable and highly-lucrative form of deceit used by brands who know, innately, that its products can’t justify themselves.
    …
    Its rise has been fueled by word of mouth, or blog posts on sites such as this one. There’s no seeding, gifting of products or relying on so-called “influencers.” Instead of coercing, the brand seduces. Emphasis is entirely on the product.

    —Aleks Eror

  • We don’t come into this world separate, or belonging to a select few, but we’re a part of the human race. All of us amazingly the same in spite of our differences.

    This is the real thing. We belong to each other. We always have…

    I count it a loss if I don’t touch a life, offer a smile, a prayer, a pause along the way. So every day I continue to do this one tiny thing. This one tiny, incredible thing.

    —River Jordan, Praying for Strangers

  • “The question of where to live and what to do is really insignificant compared to the question of how to keep the eyes of my heart focused on the Lord. I can be teaching at Yale, working in the bakery at the Genesee Abbey, walking with poor children in Peru, or writing a book, and still feel totally useless.”

    —Henri Nouwen

  • A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man he prayed constantly for chastity; but years later he realised that while his lips had been saying, “Oh Lord, make me chaste,” his heart had been secretly adding, “But please don’t do it just yet.”

    —C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

  • “Do not give from your abundance, but from your needs.”

    —Fr. Kyrillos Said

  • Stop pleasing yourself and you will not hate your brother; stop loving yourself and you will love God.”

    —St. Maximos the Confessor

  • “In an ordinary journey, the further the traveler proceeds, the more tired he becomes; but on the way of spiritual life the longer a man travels, reaching forth unto those things which are before, the greater the strength and power he acquires for his further progress.”

    —Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain