#hi

Do not say, 'But it is hypocritical to thank God with my tongue when I don't feel thankful in my heart.' There is such a thing as hypocritical thanksgiving. Its aim is to conceal ingratitude and get the praise of men. That is not your aim. Your aim in loosing your tongue with words of gratitude is that God would be merciful and fill your words with the emotion of true gratitude. You are not seeking the praise of men; you are seeing the mercy of God. You are not hiding the hardness of ingratitude, but hoping for the in-breaking of the Spirit. Thanksgiving with the Mouth Stirs Up Thankfulness in the Heart Moreover, we should probably ask the despairing saint, 'Do you know your heart so well that you are sure the words of thanks have no trace of gratitude in them?' I, for one, distrust my own assessment of my motives. I doubt that I know my good ones well enough to see all the traces of contamination. And I doubt that I know my bad ones well enough to see the traces of grace. Therefore, it is not folly for a Christian to assume that there is a residue of gratitude in his heart when he speaks and sings of God's goodness even though he feels little or nothing. To this should be added that experience shows that doing the right thing, in the way I have described, is often the way toward being in the right frame. Hence Baxter gives this wise counsel to the oppressed Christian: 'Resolve to spend most of your time in thanksgiving and praising God. If you cannot do it with the joy that you should, yet do it as you can. You have not the power of your comforts; but have you no power of your tongues? Say not that you are unfit for thanks and praises unless you have a praising heart and were the children of God; for every man, good and bad, is bound to praise God, and to be thankful for all that he hath received, and to do it as well as he can, rather than leave it undone.... Doing it as you can is the way to be able to do it better. Thanksgiving stirreth up thankfulness in the heart. ↗

— John Piper

#thankfulness #experience

To be perfectly honest, I think that as I'm growing older, I'm just growing more impatient. I'll be very happy if at some point people say, 'Michael's grown wiser and softer in his old age.' But we'll have to wait and see what my next project is. ↗

— Michael Haneke

#growing #grown #happy #his #honest

I'm not really satisfied with anything I have written to date. ↗

— Mike Gordon

#date #i #really #satisfied #written

I don't believe, the president doesn't believe, that the high income tax cuts work, period. I don't think the evidence supports that. ↗

— Austan Goolsbee

#cuts #evidence #high #i #income

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing. ↗

— Howard Gordon

#always #daunting #doing #every #i

Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#before #comes #depend #every #facts

Rush Limbaugh, we expect nonsense from him. But the Vatican, that's another story. When the Vatican is so threatened that it launches attacks on nuns, well, you know what they say in politics, a hit dog hollers. ↗

— Jennifer M. Granholm

#attacks #dog #expect #him #hit

It seems that the most important thing about Reagan was his anti-Communism and his reputation as a hawk who saw the Soviet Union as an 'evil empire.' ↗

— Mikhail Gorbachev

#empire #evil #evil empire #hawk #his

From Ernest Hemingway's stories, I learned to listen within my stories for what went unsaid by my characters. ↗

— Nadine Gordimer

#ernest #hemingway #i #learned #listen

I stopped getting nervous a long time ago, so any time I do get nervous, which is rare - about work, anyway - I always take that as a really good sign. ↗

— Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#ago #always #any #anyway #get