#kind

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#brave #courage #generous #giving #grace

The Goddess spoke to all the dead. She was beloved for it. It seemed she passed on that gift to you. Oh, it taxed her immensely, but she tried to set as many to rest as she could. Sometimes it only takes one word of kindness, you know, to set a soul at ease. ↗

— Leanna Renee Hieber

#ghosts #goddess #kindness #strangely-beautiful-series #beauty

He was so handsome, so beautiful. Inside and out. ↗

— Jay Bell

#beauty

The notion of sitting down and conjuring up, not only words in which to clothe thoughts but thoughts worthy of being clothed--the whole thing was absurdly beyond his desires. ↗

— F. Scott (Francis Scott) Fitzgerald

#beauty

How I wish you could have known me in my strength. ↗

— Marilynne Robinson

#brave #courage #fortitude #grace #inspirational

I hope you will grow up gentle and good, and never learn bad ways; do your work with a good will, lift your feet up well when you trot, and never bite or kick even in play. ↗

— Anna Sewell

#goodness #kindness #beauty

...the third reason [for being nice to the underdogs in life] being that the wheel of fortune is always spinning, spinning. And just because you're at the top today doesn't mean it'll always be so. When you're at the bottom, you'll want someone to be there for you too. ↗

— Lauren Baratz-Logsted

#life #beauty

His lips met mine again, this time in a slow, soft caress, conveying everything he had just said in those beautiful words that had reached my very soul. I could have drowned in that kiss. I could have lived there for eternity. It filled me up with everything I needed to survive. He gave me life through his lips and I treasured it. ↗

— Nicola Claire

#kindred-series #lucinda-monk #beauty

We are all powerless to heal ourselves. Research shows that self-help statements have been found to be ineffective and even harmful by making some people with low self-esteem feel even worse about themselves in the long term. As a matter of fact, positive self-statements frequently end up reinforcing and strengthening one’s original negative self-perception they were trying to change. ↗

— Justin S. Holcomb

#change

There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale. ↗

— Laura Miller

#change