Shauna > Shauna's Quotes

“When suffering is sharp and profound, I expect and believe that God will meet me in its midst. But in the struggles of my average day I somehow feel I have a right to be annoyed.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“I need rituals that encourage me to embrace what is repetitive, ancient, and quiet. But what I crave is novelty and stimulation.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.”
― Robert Frost

“Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“Some of the most reverent people I know decline to call themselves religious. For them, religion connotes belief. It means being able to say what you believe about God and why. It also means being able to hold your ground in a debate with someone who believes otherwise. They, meanwhile, are not sure what they believe. They do not want to debate anyone. The longer they stand before the holy of holies, the less adequate their formulations of faith seem to them. Angels reach down and shut their mouths.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“A free society is most threatened not by uses of government that are obviously bad, but by uses of government that seem obviously good.”
― Charles Murray, What It Means to Be a Libertarian: A Personal Interpretation

“People need self-respect, but self-respect must be earned -- it cannot be self-respect if it's not earned -- and the only way to earn anything is to achieve it in the face of the possibility of failing.”
― Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

“Responsibility for the consequences of actions is not the price of freedom, but one of its rewards.”
― Charles Murray, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010

“It doesn’t matter how old someone is, it’s what they’ve experienced that counts. People can get to be a hundred and not experience a thing.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills

“To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It meas learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

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

“The new life into which we are baptized is lived out in days, hours, and minutes. God is forming us into a new people. And the place of that formation is in the small moments of today.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“...small bits of our day are profoundly meaningful
because they are the site of our worship. The crucible of our formation is in the monotony of our daily routines.”
― Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life

“Beware; for I am fearless, and therefore powerful.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

“Even the smallest person can change the course of the future”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“Always use the sword to stand for good and right, never do a thing you would be ashamed of, but never let your heart rule your mind.”
― Brian Jacques, Martin the Warrior: A Tale from Redwall

“Our happiness is completely and utterly intertwined with other people: family and friends and neighbors and the woman you hardly notice who cleans your office. Happiness is not a noun or verb. It's a conjunction. Connective tissue.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“Some cultures, for instance, are collectivist; others are individualistic. Collectivist cultures, like Japan and other Confucian nations, value social harmony more than any one person’s happiness. Individualistic cultures, like the United States, value personal satisfaction more than communal harmony. That’s why the Japanese have a well-known expression: “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” In America, the nail that sticks out gets a promotion or a shot at American Idol. We are a nation of protruding nails.”
― Eric Weiner, The Geography of Bliss: One Grump's Search for the Happiest Places in the World

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since.
"Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“when we do not know, or when we do not know enough, we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts.”*5”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“Megan Phelps-Roper didn’t start “thinking for herself”—she started thinking with different people. To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for “thinking for herself” they usually mean “ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of.”
― Alan Jacobs, How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds

“Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What's Wrong with the World

“I have called this book "What Is Wrong with the World?" and the upshot of the title can be easily and clearly stated. What is wrong is that we do not ask what is right.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“If you happen to pass by 84 Charing Cross Road, kiss it for me? I owe it so much.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“i go through life watching the english language being raped before me face, like miniver cheevy, i was born too late.

and like miniver cheevy i cough and call it fate and go on drinking.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road

“I shall sprinkle pale pencil marks through it pointing out the best passages to some booklover yet unborn.”
― Helene Hanff, 84, Charing Cross Road