I started making a list of quotes a while back and found the list recently. Here are few quotes which have impacted me:
A little alarm now and then keeps life from stagnation.
– Fanny Burney
The hilltop hour would not be half so wonderful if there were no dark valleys to traverse.
– Helen Keller
Like an ox-cart driver in monsoon season or the skipper of a grounded ship, one must sometimes go forward by going back.
– John Barth
We are so utterly ordinary, so commonplace, while we profess to know a Power the Twentieth century does not reckon with. But we are ‘harmless,’ and therefore unharmed. We are spiritual pacifists, non-militants, conscientious objectors in this battle-to-the-death with principalities and powers in high places. Meekness must be had for contact with men, but brass, outspoken boldness is required to take part in the comradeship of the Cross. We are ‘sideliners’ – coaching and criticizing the real wrestlers while content to sit by and leave the enemies of God unchallenged. The world cannot hate us, we are too much like its own. Oh that God would make us dangerous.
– Jim Elliot in Shadow of the Almighty, by Elizabeth Elliot
One of the challenges of complete surrender to Christ is that we don’t know what lies ahead. Doubtless, some of us might be more inclined to surrender if God would hand us a contract with all details filled in. We’d like to know what to expect: “What will cost me? Where will God expect me to go? What will He ask me to do?”We want to see all the fine print so we can read it over, think about it, and then decide whether to sign our name on the dotted line. But that’s not God’s way. God says instead, “Here’s a blank piece of paper. I want you to sign your name on the bottom line, hand it back to Me, and let me fill in the details. Why? Because I am God; because I am trustworthy; because you know how much I love you; because you live for My glory and not your own independent, self-promoting pleasure.”
–Surrender by Nancy Leigh Demoss
I sense tonight that my desires to be great are likely to frustrate God’s intents for good to be done through me. O Lord, let me pray again with earnest, honest heart: I will not to be great – only, God, grant to me Thy goodness.
– Jim Elliot in Shadow of the Almighty, by Elizabeth Elliot
When I had Lauren, I realized that, for the first time in my life, really, my heart was outside of me, in another, and as such was completely vulnerable. Love does that. It distributes you outside yourself somehow. It cannot just make an alliance. There really is a joining. A finding of things missing from yourself in the other. Which means you must admit the defects and supply the other’s … Society says, ‘wait till you know who you are’. What does that mean? Wait till you get a head full of ideas and ambitions? In some sense, the simple dreams of young lovers are the really good ones. Get married, love each other, be intimate, have an adventure … Your wife will complicate your life terribly. But, good lives are complicated. And good wives are complicated. I’m on a roll here…
–Dan Kearns’ Father on Love (from an AIM conversation with Dan, I think – correct me if I’m wrong)