#spirit

I applied my reason at every moment. Reason is excellent for getting food, clothing and shelter. Reason is the very best tool kit. Nothing beats reason for keeping tigers away. But be excessively reasonable and you risk throwing out the universe with the bathwater. ↗

— Yann Martel

#food

There are victories of the soul and spirit. Sometimes, even if you lose, you win. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#lose #sometimes #soul #spirit #victories

every time God forgives us, God is saying that God's own rules do not matter as much as the relationship that God wants to create with us. ↗

— Richard Rohr

#spirituality #forgiveness

Don't you realize," Merlin said to his pupil, "that the history of the universe has brought us here to this second? ↗

— Deepak Chopra

#life

We need repentance. You see, repentance is not only going to a priest and confessing. We must free ourselves from the obsession of thoughts. We fall many times during our life, and it is absolutely necessary to reveal everything [in Confession] to a priest who is a witness to our repentance. Repentance is the renewal of life. This means we must free ourselves from all our negative traits and turn toward absolute good. No sin is unforgivable except the sin of unrepentance. ↗

— Elder Thaddeus of Vitovnica

#confession #eastern-orthodoxy #forgiveness #good #obsession

An extravagance is something that your spirit thinks is a necessity. ↗

— Bern Williams

#necessity #something #spirit #thinks #your

Form follows function - that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union. ↗

— Frank Lloyd Wright

#follows #form #function #joined #misunderstood

Every conquering temptation represents a new fund of moral energy. Every trial endured and weathered in the right spirit makes a soul nobler and stronger than it was before. ↗

— William Butler Yeats

#conquering #endured #energy #every #fund

There are two things to be aware of if the fight against evil inclinations is to have any chance of success. First, our efforts will never be sufficient on their own. Only the grace of Christ can win us the victory. Therefore our chief weapons are prayer, patience, and hope. Second, one passion can only be cured by another - a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person's calling. ↗

— Jacques Philippe

#temptations #freedom

Cruelty is a mystery, and the waste of pain. But if we describe a world to compass these things, a world that is a long, brute game, then we bump against another mystery: the inrush of power and light…unless all ages and races of men have been deluded by the same mass hypnotist (who?), there seems to be such a thing as beauty, a grace wholly gratuitous…we don’t know what’s going on here. If these tremendous events are random combinations of matter run amok, the yield of millions of monkeys at millions of typewriters, then what is it in us, hammered out of those same typewriters, that they ignite? We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. ↗

— Annie Dillard

#landscape #mystery #mysticism #spirituality #age