Lori Oehler > Lori's Quotes

“If, in the end, you have not chosen Jesus Christ it will not matter what you have chosen.”
― Neal A. Maxwell

“Don't wish me happiness
I don't expect to be happy all the time...
It's gotton beyond that somehow.
Wish me courage and strength and a sense of humor.
I will need them all.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“it takes as much courage to have tried and failed as it does to have tried and succeded.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I do not believe that sheer suffering teaches. If suffering alone taught, all the world would be wise, since everyone suffers. To suffering must be added mourning, understanding, patience, love, openness, and the willingness to remain vulnerable.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Only love can be divided endlessly and still not diminish.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
― Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London, to His Friends in the Country, by Dr. Goldsmith

“Women need solitude in order to find again the true essence of themselves.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“...I want first of all - in fact, as an end to these other desires - to be at peace with myself. I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central cor to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can. I want, in fact - to borrow from the language of the saints -to live 'in grace' as much of the time as possible. I am not using this term in a strictly theological sense. By grace I mean an inner harmony, essentially spiritual, which can be translated into outward harmony...”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The earth laughs in flowers.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“The shape of my life is, of course, determined by many things; my background and childhood, my mind and its education, my conscience and its pressures, my heart and its desires.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn't seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When I cannot write a poem, I bake biscuits and feel just as pleased.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Not knowing how to feed the spirit, we try to muffle its demands in distraction...What matters is that one be for a time inwardly attentive.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“This is what one thirsts for, I realize, after the smallness of the day, of work, of details, of intimacy - even of communication, one thirsts for the magnitude and universality of a night full of stars, pouring into one like a fresh tide.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Cultivate the habit of being grateful for every good thing that comes to you, and to give thanks continuously. And because all things have contributed to your advancement, you should include all things in your gratitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When each partner loves so completely that he has forgotten to ask himself whether or not he is loved in return; when he only knows that he loves and is moving to its music—then, and then only are two people able to dance perfectly in tune to the same rhythm.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“With a new awareness, both painful and humorous, I begin to understand why the saints were rarely married women. I am convinced it has nothing inherently to do, as I once supposed, with chastity or children. It has to do primarily with distractions. The bearing, rearing, feeding and educating of children; the running of a house with its thousand details; human relationships with their myriad pulls--woman's normal occupations in general run counter to creative life, or contemplative life, or saintly life. The problem is not merely one of Woman and Career, Woman and the Home, Woman and Independence. It is more basically: how to remain whole in the midst of the distractions of life; how to remain balanced, no matter what centrifugal forces tend to pull one off center; how to remain strong, no matter what shocks come in at the periphery and tend to crack the hub of the wheel.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Perhaps both men and women in America may hunger, in our material, outward, active, masculine culture, for the supposedly feminine qualities of heart, mind and spirit--qualities which are actually neither masculine nor feminine, but simply human qualities that have been neglected. It is growth along these lines that will make us whole, and will enable the individual to become world to himself.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“The intellectual is constantly betrayed by his vanity. Godlike he blandly assumes that he can express everything in words whereas the things one loves, lives, and dies for are not, in the last analysis completely expressible in words.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“I feel a hunger now- a real hunger-for letting the pool still itself & seeing the reflections.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“You cannot do a kindness too soon, for you never know how soon it will be too late.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“In my walks, every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One writes not to be read but to breathe...one writes to think, to pray, to analyze. One writes to clear one's mind, to dissipate one's fears, to face one's doubts, to look at one's mistakes--in order to retrieve them. One writes to capture and crystallize one's joy, but also to disperse one's gloom. Like prayer--you go to it in sorrow more than joy, for help, a road back to 'grace'.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, War Within & Without: Diaries and Letters of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1939-1944

“If one sets aside time
for a business appointment, a trip to the hairdresser, a social engagement or a shopping expedition,
that time is accepted as inviolable. But if one says: I cannot come because that is my hour to be alone,
one is considered rude, egotistical or strange. What a commentary on our civilization, when being
alone is considered suspect; when one has to apologize for it, make excuses, hide the fact that one
practices it—like a secret vice!”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea

“Only when one is connected to one's inner core is one connected to others. And, for me, the core, the inner spring, can best be re-found through solitude.”
― Anne Morrow Lindbergh

“Be silly. Be honest. Be kind.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson