SO GOOD QUOTES

  • What if part of God’s message to the world was you? The true and real you?
    …
    The more fully we live into ourselves, the more impact we will have. Acting may get us the applause we want, but taking a risk on being ourselves is the only path toward true intimacy. And true intimacy, the exchange of affection between two people who are not lying, is transforming.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

  • MARTHA GRAHAM ONCE said, that each of us is unique and if we didn’t exist something in the world would have been lost. I wonder, then, why we are so quick to conform—and what the world has lost because we have.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

  • I always felt two whiskeys in while everybody I talked to was as polished as a news anchor.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

  • “So in every test, let us say: ‘Thank you, my God, because this was needed for my salvation.’”

    —Elder Paisios of Mount Athos

  • Almost without exception the most beautiful, selfless people I’ve met are ones who’ve experienced personal tragedy.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Finding True Intimacy

  • I reminded him of all the people who love him and all the people he’s loved. I told him I thought it was unfair for a man to be judged by a moment, by a season. We are all more complicated than that. Certainly my friend will have to face the consequences of his actions, and those consequences will be severe. He is being pruned, as it were. His limbs are being cut back. But I hope he doesn’t live into his failures the way so many people do.

    —Donald Miller, Scary Close: Dropping the Act and Acquiring a Taste for True Intimacy

  • “The natural property of the lemon tree is such that it lifts its branches upwards when it has no fruit, but the more the branches bend down the more fruit they bear. Those who have the mind to understand will grasp the meaning of this.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “Those who have been humbled by their passions may take courage. For even if they fall into every pit and are trapped in all the snares and suffer all maladies, yet after their restoration to health they become physicians, beacons, lamps, and pilots for all, teaching us the habits of every disease and from their own personal experience able to prevent their neighbours from falling.”

    —St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent

  • “If you find yourself becoming irritated, control your nerves and control your tongue, control your facial expressions and control your movements, and do not allow yourself to mistreat another, however much they erred against you.”

    —H.H. Pope Shenouda III

  • If, desirous of bringing them to self-knowledge and of leading them to the right path of perfection, God sends them afflictions and sickness, or allows them to be persecuted, by which means He habitually tests His true and real servants, this test immediately shows what is hidden in their hearts, and how deeply they are corrupted by pride. For whatever affliction may visit them, they refuse to bend their necks to the yoke of God’s will and to trust in His righteous and secret judgments. They do not want to follow the example of our Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, Who humbled Himself and suffered for our sakes, and they refuse to be humble, to consider themselves the lowest of all creatures, and to regard their persecutors as their good friends, the tools of the divine bounty shown to them and helpers in their salvation.

    —Lorenzo Scupoli, Unseen Warfare