Bob Towner > Bob's Quotes

“A Christian fellowship lives and exists by the intercession of its members for one another, or it collapses. I can no longer condemn or hate a brother for whom I pray, no matter how much trouble he causes me. His face, that hitherto may have been strange and intolerable to me, is transformed in intercession into the countenance of a brother for whom Christ died, the face of a forgiven sinner.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“The person who loves their dream of community will destroy community, but the person who loves those around them will create community.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“Who can really be faithful in great things if he has not learned to be faithful in the things of daily life?”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together: The Classic Exploration of Christian Community

“That the most excellent method he had found of going to GOD, was that of doing our common business without any view of pleasing men, [Gal. i. 10; Eph. vi. 5, 6.] and (as far as we are capable) purely for the love of GOD.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

“I tried to discover, in the rumor of forests and waves, words that other men could not hear, and I pricked up my ears to listen to the revelation of their harmony.”
― Gustave Flaubert, November

“What can be shown, cannot be said.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

“The Reformation was a time when men went blind, staggering drunk because they had discovered, in the dusty basement of late medievalism, a whole cellar full of fifteen-hundred-year-old, two-hundred proof Grace–bottle after bottle of pure distilate of Scripture, one sip of which would convince anyone that God saves us single-handedly. The word of the Gospel–after all those centuries of trying to lift yourself into heaven by worrying about the perfection of your bootstraps–suddenly turned out to be a flat announcement that the saved were home before they started…Grace has to be drunk straight: no water, no ice, and certainly no ginger ale; neither goodness, nor badness, not the flowers that bloom in the spring of super spirituality could be allowed to enter into the case.”
― Robert Farrar Capon, Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace

“Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.
(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)”
― Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensees

“Reason's last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“There are only two kinds of men: the righteous who think they are sinners and the sinners who think they are righteous.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“Man's grandeur is that he knows himself to be miserable.”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Writings

“What a chimaera then is man, what a novelty, what a monster, what chaos, what a subject of contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, yet an imbecile earthworm; depository of truth, yet a sewer of uncertainty and error; pride and refuse of the universe. Who shall resolve this tangle?”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“There is no solution; seek it lovingly ”
― Socrates

“Thank God for the things that I do not own.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“God save us from gloomy saints!”
― St. Theresa of Avila

“I am quite sure I am more afraid of people who are themselves terrified of the devil than I am of the devil himself.”
― Santa Teresa de Jesús, The Life of Saint Teresa of Ávila by Herself

“Knock, And He'll open the door
Vanish, And He'll make you shine like the sun
Fall, And He'll raise you to the heavens
Become nothing, And He'll turn you into everything.”
― Jalal Ad-Din Rumi

“Never, oh! never, nothing will die;
The stream flows,
The wind blows,
The cloud fleets,
The heart beats,
Nothing will die.”
― Alfred Lord Tennyson

“That we ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of GOD, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed. That we should not wonder if, in the beginning, we often failed in our endeavors, but that at last we should gain a habit, which will naturally produce its acts in us, without our care, and to our exceeding great delight.”
― Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God

“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return; prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only, as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again; if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man; then you are ready for a walk.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“A township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive forest rots below,—such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“Christ has no body now on earth but yours,
no hands but yours,
no feet but yours,
Yours are the eyes through which to look out
Christ's compassion to the world
Yours are the feet with which he is to go about
doing good;
Yours are the hands with which he is to bless men now.”
― St. Teresa of Avila

“A tree stands strong not by its fruits or branches, but by the depth of its roots.”
― Anthony Liccione

“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“And what's strange, what would be marvelous, is not that God should really exist; the marvel is that such an idea, the idea of the necessity of God, could enter the head of such a savage, vicious beast as man.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Remember particularly that you cannot be a judge of anyone. For no one can judge a criminal until he recognizes that he is just such a criminal as the man standing before him, and that he perhaps is more than all men to blame for that crime. When he understands that, he will be able to be a judge. Though that sounds absurd, it is true. If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me. If you can take upon yourself the crime of the criminal your heart is judging, take it at once, suffer for him yourself, and let him go without reproach. And even if the law itself makes you his judge, act in the same spirit so far as possible, for he will go away and condemn himself more bitterly than you have done. If, after your kiss, he goes away untouched, mocking at you, do not let that be a stumbling-block to you. It shows his time has not yet come, but it will come in due course. And if it come not, no matter; if not he, then another in his place will understand and suffer, and judge and condemn himself, and the truth will be fulfilled. Believe that, believe it without doubt; for in that lies all the hope and faith of the saints.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home. People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one's heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Love is a teacher, but one must know how to acquire it, for it is difficult to acquire, it is dearly bought, by long work over a long time, for one ought to love not for a chance moment but for all time. Anyone, even a wicked man, can love by chance.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov