Great Throughts Treasury

"The Society of Friends?.is primarily and essentially a widely scattered number of local meetings, little cells, where the actual vitality and power and future potency of Quakerism is being settled and determined. We work in vain unless we keep our minds focused on these local units."

"The Spirit of man is a candle of God's lighting. It means that there is something in man's inmost being that can be kindled and struck into flame by God and as we feed the flame with our lives we can become revealing places for God, a flame of God's life. If it is true, and I believe it is, it is one of the greatest words that was ever spoken. It puts the basis of religion at the center of man's life where it belongs. Religion on this view is not an addendum to life, not something added on by a remedial scheme to a spiritually barren and bankrupt being. Religion is not a foreign bestowal; it is a divine spring and capacity which belongs to our being as men. Religion is just over-brimming, abounding life. My cup runs over."

"The task of religion is not like that of laboriously endeavoring to teach an elephant to fly; it is rather the discovery of the potential capacities for flight in a being that was framed for the upper air."

"The thing we need primarily is an enlarged capacity of appreciation of the range and quality of His personality. We need once more to see Him."

"The time is coming when every sound teacher will realize that it is fully as important to have expert treatment for children's fears and mental 'complexes' as for their defects of eyesight and hearing."

"The whole atmosphere of service must be pervaded by a calm mind, by a spirit of reconciliation, by clear insight, by undeviating fidelity, and by respect for the views of life which are precious to those whom you are serving."

"There are no known limits to the creative and transforming effects of this cooperation of the spirit of a believing person with the Great Divine Companion."

"There is in most of us a vast acreage of our inner estate which has never been touched by the plow. It remains uncultivated. We are this, we have been this, but how much more we might be. Coming to our self, our true self, and reaching out with divine help and the gift of Grace to win the whole of oneself is to be 'spiritual-minded.'"

"There is not the least ground for doubt that Christ was divine, that He was and is a revelation of God."

"Those of us who pray have the best of all evidence that prayer is a vital breath of life, for we come back from it quickened and vitalized, refreshed and restored?."

"To be a teacher who knows how to enlarge the depth and scope of a person's life is the best gift there is."

"To discover a truth involves the apostolic task of going out and doing it."

"We have won an enviable place in the eyes of the world as the purveyors of relief. We have learned to meet and to take up the sufferings of the world?Now we need to give as serious and as creative thought and consideration to the renewal of the spiritual life and power of our Meetings and of our membership as we have given to the constructive tasks of the world."

"We shall not be able to rebuild our shattered world until we recover our faith in eternal realities, and we shall not do that until we discover spirit within ourselves."

"What needs to grow clear in the minds of all who are responsible for the training of youth, whether within or entirely outside the Church, is the fact that all genuine education must have a spiritual quality to it, - that is, it must have to do with the formation of personality, the building of character, the enlargement of life, the transmission of the supreme experiences of the race, and with setting free the higher potential powers of the individual."

"What these pillar Quakers were talking about when they used their various figures of speech - 'inward light,' 'immortal Seed,' 'Christ within,' - was their certainty that God was not remote, not a far-off sky-God, not merely a Creator at some distant 'beginning,' not a Being Who left us with nothing but a Book as a Guide on our hazardous pathway, but a God here and now present in us, as near as breathing; moving not merely on the waters at some far-away date, but operating directly and immediately in the soul of man here and now."

"You?re not allowed to chart love. The reason ? is because we think of love as a binary thing: You?re either in love, or you?re not in love. You love, or you don?t love. I think the reality is that love is a process."