#counter

We had been hopelessly labouring to plough waste lands; to make nationality grow in a place full of the certainty of God… Among the tribes our creed could be only like the desert grass – a beautiful swift seeming of spring; which, after a day’s heat, fell dusty. ↗

— T.E. Lawrence

#military #beauty

There's a difference between thinking you can't be wrong and having no regrets. Wrongness is what occurs prior to empiricism, in hindsight a counterpart of revelation, and revelation is nothing to regret. ↗

— Criss Jami

#counterpart #discovery #empiricism #experience #failures

Most of the church landscape in my lifetime has been heavily invested in trying to do something for Jerry or Sherri or some other icon of unchurchness. The problem is that they have been only about themselves from the moment they could wail for their mothers, and the decision to give them at church what they can find in any self-help book appears now as a choice to abandon the One in whose honor the church gathers. What they need is to be set free from themselves with finality and to be lost in the awesome wonder of the manifest presence of God. It was never God’s desire that He would sit on the sideline and watch us frantically devise impressive ways to reach people or simply hold the line on orthodoxy as though faithfulness can exist in a vacuum apart from fruitfulness. God is the Matter of first importance! Can you say that about your current weekly encounter with church? ↗

— James MacDonald

#encounter #focus #god #task #vision

LONG LIVE... This country is but a wish of the spirit, a counter-sepulcher. In my country, tender proofs of spring and badly dressed birds are preferred to far-off goals. Truth waits for dawn beside a candle. Window glass is neglected. To the watchful, what does it matter? In my country, we don't question a man deeply moved. There is no malignant shadow on the capsized boat. A cool hello is unknown in my country. We borrow only what can be returned increased. There are leaves, many leaves, on the trees in my country. The branches are free to bear no fruits. We don't believe in the good faith of the victor. In my country, we say thank you. ↗

— René Char

#counter-sepulcher #madness #spirit #the-dawn-breakers #trees

Their books are also different. Works of fiction contain a single plot, with all its imaginable permutations. Those of a philosophical nature invariably include both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and con of a doctrine. A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete. ↗

— Jorge Luis Borges

#borges #counterbook #imaginable-permutations #orbis-tertius #tlön

I think all art is about control - the encounter between control and the uncontrollable. ↗

— Richard Avedon

#art #between #control #encounter #i

Not so much two ships passing in the night as two ships sailing together for a time but always bound for different ports. ↗

— P.D. James

#romance #adam

I think what we've learned is that the terrorist threat is serious, but it shifts. You cannot make a single person the sole focus of your counterterrorism. ↗

— Paul Bremer

#counterterrorism #focus #i #i think #learned

When I began going to school and learned to read, I encountered stories of other people and other lands. ↗

— Chinua Achebe

#encountered #going #i #lands #learned

Certainly, the Bush Administration will rely in the first instance on its friends, since it would be both illogical and counterproductive to reward its adversaries. ↗

— Richard V. Allen

#adversaries #both #bush #bush administration #certainly