Quotes

The call to be a prophet is more than an invitation. it is first of all a feeling of being enticed, of acquiescence or willing surrender. But this winsome feeling is only one aspect of the experience. the other aspect is s sense of being ravished or carried away by violence, of yielding to overpowering force against one’s own will. The prophet feels both the attraction and the coercion of God, the appeal and the pressure, the charm and the stress. He is conscious of both the voluntary identification and forced capitulation.

-  Abraham Heschel
The Prophets, p 145

Consider him further still. Do you mark him in your imagination nailed to yonder cross! O eyes! ye are full of pity, with tears standing thick! Oh! how I mark the floods gushing down his checks! Do you see his hands bleeding, and his feet too, gushing gore? Behold him! The bulls of Bashan gird him round, and the dogs are hounding him to death! Hear him! “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” The earth startles with affright. A God is groaning on a cross! What! Does not this dishonour Christ? No; it honours him! Each of the thorns becomes a brilliant in his diadem of glory; the nails are forged into his sceptre, and his wounds do clothe him with the purple of empire. The treading of the wine-press hath stained his garments, but not with stains of scorn and dishonour. The stains are embroideries upon his royal robes for ever. The treading of that wine-press hath made his garments purple with the empire of a world; and he is the Master of a universe for ever. O Christian! sit down and consider that thy Master did not mount from earth’s mountains into heaven, but from her valleys. It was not from heights of bliss on earth that he strode to bliss eternal, but from depths of woe he mounted up to glory. Oh! what a stride was that, when, at one mighty step from the grave to the throne of The Highest, the man Christ, the God, did gloriously ascend.

- Charles Spurgeon
The Exultation of Christ

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He said that as far as the miseries and sins he heard of daily in the world, he was so far from wondering at them, that, on the contrary, he was surprised there were not more, considering the malice sinners were capable of.

- Brother Lawrence,
The Practice of the Presence of God

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“All the problems of heaven and earth, though they were to confront us together and at once, would be nothing compared with the overwhelming problem of God: That He is; what He is like; and what we as moral beings must do about Him.”

-A.W. Tozer
Knowledge of the Holy

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“A prophet is the one who, when everyone else despairs hopes. And when everyone else hopes, he despairs. You’ll ask me why. It’s because he has mastered the Great Secret: that the Wheel turns.”

- Nikos Kazantzakis

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When the principles that run against your deepest convictions begin to win the day, then the battle is your calling, and peace has become sin. You must at the price of dearest peace lay your convictions bare before friend and enemy with all the fire of your faith.

- Abraham Kuyper

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“It happened in a theatre that the coulisses caught fire. The Clown was sent to inform the public. It took this as a joke and applauded; he repeated; they jubilated even more. Thus I think that the World will perish under general jubilation from witty heads believing that it is a witticism.”

-Søren Kierkegaard

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The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”

-Jack Kerouac
On the Road

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but if all that’s left is duty
i’m falling on my sword
at least then i would not serve
an unseen distant lord

-Pedro the Lion
Secret of the Easy Yoke

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The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre—
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

- T.S. Eliot
Little Gidding IV

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And in my best behavior
I am really just like him
Look beneath the floorboards
For the secrets I have hid

- Sufjan Stevens

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Now I don’t know when but a day is gonna come
When there won’t be a moon and there won’t be a sun
It will all go black
It will all go back
To the way it is supposed to be

- Conor Oberst

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There’s a better way coming and we both know what it is

- Derek Webb
the Ringing Bell

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Let you be stripped of your purple dyes, for I too once in the wilderness with my wife had all the treasure I wished.

- Enkidu

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Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: ‘pati.’ It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.

-Daphne Kaplan,
‘The Courage to With Stand’
quoted in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

“Let me learn by paradox;

that the way down is the way up,
that to be low is to be high,
that the broken heart is the healed heart,
that the contrite spirit is the rejoicing spirit,
that the repenting soul is the victorious soul,
that to have nothing is to possess all,
that to bear the cross is to wear the crown,
that to give is to receive,
that the valley is the place of vision”

- The Valley of Vision:
A Collections of Puritan Prayers and Devotions

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Jesus suffered and died alone. But those who follow him suffer and die in fellowship with him. For all they have in common, there is a difference. “Hence while it is still true that suffering means being cut off from God, yet within the fellowship of Christ’s suffering, suffering is overcome by suffering and becomes the way to communion with God.” and therefore to follow Jesus is joyful.”

Jürgen Moltmann
The Crucified God

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