Robert Benson > Quotes

“Sometimes I wish that I could sing or dance or paint or compose symphonies or build cathedrals to express somehow what all of this means to me. I wish I were a priest or a robin or a child or a sunset.”
― Robert Benson, Living Prayer

“A four year old girl was overheard whispering in her newborn baby brother's ear: "Baby," she whispers, "tell me what God sounds like. I'm starting to forget." -- Between the Dreaming and the Coming True”
― Robert Benson, Between the Dreaming and the Coming True: The Road Home to God

“People do not lose respect for a man when he's down. They lose it when he refuses to get up.”
― Robert Guillame as Benson

“How do we come to choose what it is that we spend our days doing? Would we choose it again if we could? Did we choose it today, or has it simply carried us along somehow?”
― Robert Benson

“The paradox of worship is this: we perform these acts of worship, but they are not actually for us. We do these things for God, and then we are the ones who are changed.”
― Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer

“Writing is hard enough. Writing can be doubly hard when one tries to write to some unseen, unknown crowd of folks in Peoria or any other spot on the planet.”
― Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life

“Our longing for community seems to be a part of the image of the One Who made us, a part of the divine image whispered into us when we were whispered into being in the first place.”
― Robert Benson, A Good Neighbor: Benedict's Guide to Community

“A direct relationship exists between the caliber of the writing you read and the caliber of the writing you make.”
― Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life

“I know I am finished with a book when I never want to see it again. And if you have worked at it long enough to hate the sight of it, I promise you will come to love it again some sweet day. That is when you will know you did a writer's work.”
― Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life

“Personal prayer does not dispense us from corporate prayer. The one sustains the other.”
― Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer

“Some days I am on the road. Some days I am reading, and some days I am copying quotes. Some days I am writing letters, and some days I am writing chapters. There are no days when I am not working on the craft. There are no days when I am not a writer,”
― Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life

“One of the secrets to sharing a work in progress is to know whom you are sharing it with and what you want to learn from them.”
― Robert Benson, Dancing on the Head of a Pen: The Practice of a Writing Life

“Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward
process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively
in stillness rather than always “pushing” to get the job done. —KATHLEEN NORRIS”
― Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer

“Sometimes it occurs to me that I am a member of the first generation of followers of Yahweh in six thousand years for whom the offering of daily fixed-hour worship and praise and prayer—a tradition practiced and treasured and passed down to us from the Hebrews to the apostles to the early Christians to the fathers and mothers of the faith who sustained this Church we now call home—is no longer deemed a necessity or an obligation or a duty or even an opportunity.”
― Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer

“The truth dazzles gradually,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “or else the world would go blind.”
― Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer

“Always we begin again,” wrote Saint Benedict.”
― Robert Benson, In Constant Prayer

“I would almost rather we had died that day than to have found ourselves here, lost somewhere between the dreaming and the coming true.”
― Robert Benson