Briana > Briana's Quotes

“Relationships take up energy; letting go of them, psychiatrists theorize, entails mental work. When you lose someone you were close to, you have to reassess your picture of the world and your place in it. The more your identity was wrapped up with the deceased, the more difficult the loss.”
― Meghan O'Rourke

“Agape doesn't love somebody because they're worthy.

Agape makes them worthy by the strength and power of its love.

Agape doesn't love somebody because they're beautiful.

Agape loves in such a way that it makes them beautiful.”
― Rob Bell, Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality

“And I think that's what our world is desperately in need of - lovers, people who are building deep, genuine relationships with fellow strugglers along the way, and who actually know the faces of the people behind the issues they are concerned about.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Freedom is not having everything we crave, it's being able to go without the things we crave and being OK with it. ”
― Rob Bell

“Most good things have been said far too many times and just need to be lived.”
― Shane Claiborne

“Sometimes people call folks here at the Simple Way saints. Usually they either want to applaud our lives and live vicariously through us, or they want to write us off as superhuman and create a safe distance. One of my favorite quotes, written on my wall here in bold black marker, is from Dorothy Day: "Don't call us saints; we don't want to be dismissed that easily”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“One thing that's clear in the Scriptures is that the nations do not lead people to peace; rather, people lead the nations to peace.”
― Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals

“So if the world hates us, we take courage that it hated Jesus first. If you're wondering whether you'll be safe, just look at what they did to Jesus and those who followed him. There are safer ways to live than by being a Christian.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“But as I pursued that dream of upward mobility preparing for college, things just didn't fit together. As I read Scriptures about how the last will be first, I started wondering why I was working so hard to be first.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“The more I get to know Jesus, the more trouble he seems to get me into.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Christianity is at its best when it is peculiar, marginalized, suffering, and it is at its worst when it is popular, credible, triumphal, and powerful.”
― Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals

“When the church takes affairs of the state more seriously than they do Jesus, Pax Romana becomes its gospel and the president becomes the Son of God.

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― Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals

“And that’s when things get messy. When people begin moving beyond charity and toward justice and solidarity with the poor and oppressed, as Jesus did, they get in trouble. Once we are actually friends with the folks in struggle, we start to ask why people are poor, which is never as popular as giving to charity. One of my friends has a shirt marked with the words of late Catholic bishop Dom Helder Camara: “When I fed the hungry, they called me a saint. When I asked why people are hungry, they called me a communist.” Charity wins awards and applause but joining the poor gets you killed. People do not get crucified for living out of love that disrupts the social order that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“When we truly discover how to love our neighbor as our self, Capitalism will not be possible and Marxism will not be necessary.”
― Shane Claiborne

“What is the point in calling anything God if it does not also hold sway in every part of one's life--especially one's politics?”
― Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals

“To refer to the Church as a building is to call people 2 x 4's.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“We are faithful not to the triumphant golden eagle (ironically, also an imperial symbol of power in Rome) but to the slaughtered Lamb.”
― Shane Claiborne

“Biological family is too small of a vision. Patriotism is far too myopic. A love for our own relatives and a love for the people of our own country are not bad things, but our love does not stop at the border.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted--power, relevancy, spectacle.”
― Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals

“We do need to be born again, since Jesus said that to a guy named Nicodemus. But if you tell me I have to be born again to enter the Kingdom of God, I can tell you that you have to sell everything you have and give it to the poor, because Jesus said that to one guy, too. But I guess that's why God invented highlighers, so we can highlight the parts we like and ignore the rest.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Only Jesus would be crazy enough to suggest that if you want to become the greatest, you should become the least. Only Jesus would declare God's blessing on the po0r rather than on the rich and would insist that it's not enough to just love your friends. I just began to wonder if anybody still believed Jesus meant those things he said.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“For even if the whole world believed in resurrection, little would change until we began to practice it. We can believe in CPR, but people will remain dead until someone breathes new life into them. And we can tell the world that there is life after death, but the world really seems to be wondering if there is life before death.”
― Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical

“Today the logic goes something like this: 'Calling a ruler Son of God is out of style. No one really does that nowadays. We can support a president while also worshiping Jesus as the Son of God.' But how is this possible? For one says that we must love our enemies, and the other says we must kill them; one promotes the economics of competition, while the other admonishes the forgiveness of debts. To which do we pledge allegiance?”
― Shane Claiborne, Jesus for President: Politics for Ordinary Radicals

“It belongs to the imperfection of everything human that man can only attain his desire by passing through its opposite.”
― Soren Kierkegaard

“From childhood's hour I have not been. As others were, I have not seen. As others saw, I could not awaken. My heart to joy at the same tone. And all I loved, I loved alone.”
― Edgar Allan Poe

“I went to a tattoo parlor and had YES written onto the palm of my left hand, and NO onto my right palm, what can I say, it hasn't made my life wonderful, its made life possible, when I rub my hands against each other in the middle of winter I am warming myself with the friction of YES and NO, when I clap my hands I am showing my appreciation through the uniting and parting of YES and NO, I signify "book" by peeling open my hands, every book, for me, is the balance of YES and NO, even this one, my last one, especially this one. Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn't the world, it wasn't the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, the cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don't know, but it's so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I've thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer

“I am always sad, I think. Perhaps this signifies that I am not sad at all, because sadness is something lower than your normal disposition, and I am always the same thing. Perhaps I am the only person in the world, then, who never becomes sad. Perhaps I am lucky.”
― Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

“Someday, we’ll run into each other again, I know it.
Maybe I’ll be older and smarter and just plain better. If that happens,
that’s when I’ll deserve you. But now, at this moment, you can’t hook
your boat to mine, because I’m liable to sink us both.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Memoirs of a Teenage Amnesiac

“I do not believe anyone can be perfectly well, who has a brain and a heart”
― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

“I never felt like that before. Maybe it could be depression, like you get. I can understand how you suffer now when you're depressed; I always thought you liked it and I thought you could have snapped yourself out any time, if not alone then by means of the mood organ. But when you get that depressed you don't care. Apathy, because you've lost a sense of worth. It doesn't matter whether you feel better because you have no worth.”
― Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?