Tonya Cornileus > Tonya's Quotes

“A child can teach an adult three things: to be happy for no reason, to always be busy with something, and to know how to demand with all his might that which he desires.”
― Paulo Coelho

“Perhaps the biggest tragedy of our lives is that freedom is possible, yet we can pass our years trapped in the same old patterns...We may want to love other people without holding back, to feel authentic, to breathe in the beauty around us, to dance and sing. Yet each day we listen to inner voices that keep our life small.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“When someone says to us, as Thich Nhat Hanh suggests, "Darling, I care about your suffering," a deep healing begins.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“I found myself praying: "May I love and accept myself just as I am.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Nothing is wrong—whatever is happening is just “real life.”
― Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha

“Compassion is the sometimes fatal capacity for feeling what it is like to live inside somebody else's skin. It's the knowledge that there can never really be any peace and joy for me until there is peace and joy finally for you too. ”
― Frederick Buechner

“When you remember me, it means you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.”
― Frederick Buechner

“Go where your best prayers take you.”
― Frederick Buechner

“Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”
― Frederick Buechner, Now and Then: A Memoir of Vocation – Intimate Reflections on Faith, Seminary, Ministry, and Writing

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”
― Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC

“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid.”
― Frederick Buechner, Beyond Words: Daily Readings in the ABC's of Faith

“The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts….We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need—not all the time, surely, but from time to time—to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember—the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.”
― Frederick Buechner, A Room Called Remember: Uncollected Pieces – Essays and Sermons on Faith, Love, and the Power of Words

“What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . . . ”
― Frederick Buechner, Telling Secrets: A Celebrated Author's Candid Memoir of a Father's Suicide and Its Influence on a Son and Minister

“Coincidences are God's way of getting our attention.”
― Frederick Buechner

“ . . some moment happens in your life that you say yes right up to the roots of your hair, that makes it worth having been born just to have happen. laughing with somebody till the tears run down your cheeks. waking up to the first snow. being in bed with somebody you love... whether you thank god for such a moment or thank your lucky stars, it is a moment that is trying to open up your whole life. If you turn your back on such a moment and hurry along to business as usual, it may lose you the ball game. if you throw your arms around such a moment and hug it like crazy, it may save your soul.”
― Frederick Buechner

“To be wise is to be eternally curious.”
― Frederick Buechner

“The grace of God means something like: Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you. Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid. I am with you. Nothing can ever separate us. It's for you I created the universe. I love you. There's only one catch. Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it. Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.”
― Frederick Buechner

“Believing in him is not the same as believing things about him such as that he was born of a virgin and raised Lazarus from the dead. Instead, it is a matter of giving our hearts to him, of come hell or high water putting our money on him, the way a child believes in a mother or a father, the way a mother or a father believes in a child.”
― Frederick Buechner, Secrets in the Dark: A Life in Sermons

“Joy is a mystery because it can happen anywhere, anytime, even under the most unpromising circumstances, even in the midst of suffering, with tears in its eyes....”
― Frederick Buechner

“Thus, when you wake up in the morning, called by God to be a self again, if you want to know who you are, watch your feet. Because where your feet take you, that is who you are.”
― Frederick Buechner, The Alphabet of Grace

“That which hurts, also instructs.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“The Talmud states, "Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.”
― Bridges McCall

“Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.”
― Oliver Wendall Holmes

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts.”
― Peter Block

“Doing what needs to be done may not make you happy, but it will make you great.”
― George Bernard Shaw