Great Throughts Treasury

"The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. We can never really love anybody with whom we never laugh. Love is in the giver, not the gift. He told me that once he forgot himself and opened up like a door with a loose latch and everything fell out and he tried for days to put it all back in the proper order, but he finally gave up and left if there in a pile and loved everything equally."

"When we live at each other’s mercy, we had better learn to be merciful."

"The goal of... life is not to save your soul but to transcend yourself, to vindicate the human struggle of which all of us are a part, to keep hope advancing."

"Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible."

"A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human."

"All of life is the exercise of risk."

"And that's what hundreds of you understood so beautifully. You gave me what God gives all of us--minimum protection, maximum support. I swear to you, I wouldn't be standing here were I not upheld."

"And if we are not yet one in live at least we are one in sin, which is no mean bond because it preludes the possibility of separation through judgment."

"And if we exalt freedom?, we must remember that freedom is grounded in love."

"And if God is a suffering God, if this whole universe is borne on a heart infinite in compassion, then the more we suffer in his name the closer we come to him."

"As all of us who strive to be good parents know, love is self-restricting when it comes to power.... Likewise God has left his servants freedom of choice."

"But as regards love, I am sure the Bible is right: the opposite of love is not hate but fear. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."

"But what I am beginning to suspect is that most guilty people reject the possibility of forgiveness not because it is too good to believe, but because they fear the responsibility forgiveness entails. It's hell to be guilty, but it?s worse to be responsible."

"But if we hate evil more than we love the good, we become damn good haters."

"Because our value is a gift, we don't have to prove ourselves, only to express ourselves..."

"As for loneliness, it too has deep roots in selfishness, for its anguish stems less from having no one with whom to share one's burdens, more from having only one's burdens to share."

"Compassion and justice are companions, not choices."

"Charity is only a waystation on the road to justice."

"Dare to act wholeheartedly without absolute certainty."

"By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It's time we did the same for homophobia."

"Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on the basis of morality."

"Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat."

"Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom... Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one--neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set."

"Diversity may be the hardest thing for a society to live with, and perhaps the most dangerous thing for a society to be without."

"For finally, we are as we love. It is love that measures our stature."

"For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths? one thing that should never be said when someone dies is "It is the will of God." Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break."

"God is love, as Scripture says, and that means the revelation is in the relationship. 'God is love' means God is known devotionally, not dogmatically. 'God is love' does not clear up old mysteries; it discloses new mystery. 'God is love' is not a truth we can master; it is only one to which we can surrender. Faith is being grasped by the power of love."

"For if you lessen your anger at the structures of power, you lower your love for the victims of power."

"God loves you the way you are, but he knows you can do better."

"God knows it is emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that righteousness that nourishes itself on the blood of sinners. But God also knows that what is emotionally satisfying can be spiritually devastating."

"He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.' That's not really cruel. Loving Christ more than our fathers and mothers simply saves the love we have for our parents from idolatry.... God, as the source of love, is the proper head of every loving household."

"Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts."

"God's love doesn't seek value; it creates it. It's not because we have value that we are loved, but because we're loved that we have value. So you don't have to prove yourself -- ever. That's taken care of."

"God provides minimum protection, maximum support -- support to help us grow up, to stretch our minds and hearts until they are as wide as God's universe."

"Hope reflects the state of your soul rather than the circumstances surrounding your days. Praise God and your soul gets stronger."

"I also was persuaded that the woman most in need of liberation was the woman in every man just as the man most in need of liberation was the man in every woman."

"Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful."

"I feel [this way] about religious faith; it should want to change the world? Spirituality takes various forms. In many faiths some are very profound while others, particularly these days, appear to be a mile wide and one inch deep. Urgently needed for our time is a politically engaged spirituality? A politically engaged spirituality does not call for theological sledgehammers bludgeoning people into rigid orthodoxy. Nor does it mean using scriptural language as an illegitimate shortcut to conclusions, thereby avoiding ethical deliberation. We have constantly to be aware of hard choices informed by the combination of circumstances and conscience. We insult ourselves by leaving complexities unexamined. But never must we become so cautious as to be moral failures."

"If we misconceive God as Father Protector,...then each disappointment reduces what may confidently be affirmed about God. And this is how most people lose their faith."

"If your heart is full of fear, you won't seek truth; you'll seek security. If a heart is full of love, it will have a limbering effect on the mind."

"I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings."

"I'm not okay, you're not okay, and that's okay."

"I'm not always optimistic but i am always hopeful."

"In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power, and for the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent."

"In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions."

"In home after home I have seen Jesus change beer into furniture, sinners into saints, hate-filled relations into loving ones, cowardice into courage, the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope."

"I'm not OK, you're not OK-and that's OK."

"In reality, there are no biblical literalists, only selective literalists. By abolishing slavery and ordaining women, millions of Protestants have gone far beyond biblical literalism. It's time we did the same for homophobia."

"Instead of becoming alienated from their faith in God, wouldn't it make more sense for them to become alienated from their mislaid hopes in human beings, alienated from shallow notions of automatic progress, from sentimental notions about the 'nobility of man'? [When things go badly]"

"In the Holy Land are two ancient bodies of water. Both are fed by the Jordan River. In one, fish play and roots find sustenance. In the other, there is no splash of fish, no sound of bird, no leaf around. The difference is not in the Jordan, for it empties into both, but in the Sea of Galilee: for every drop taken in one goes out. It gives and lives. The other gives nothing. And it is called the Dead Sea."