Dack Powell > Dack's Quotes

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“I believe creeds aren't worth the paper they are written on...But I still believe in God.
I believe that if you look at my life, you'll only sometimes see what I believe.
I believe that if we have two coats, we should give one away (though I don't do it).
Today I don't believe in anything; tomorrow who knows.
I sometimes believe in God- one who existed before time, beyond gender or fathom.
Maker of heaven and earth and ginger (all good things), whales, two-hundred-foot cliffs, cloud banks, shipwrecks,
And in Jesus Christ, God's only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost- how?
Born of a fourteen-year-old, Mary, scared out of her wits.
Was crucified, dead, and buried, and I used to believe in the penal substitution theory of atonement, but now I just see a violent death and struggle to see how violence can ever be redemptive...
He descended into hell, or was hell all around him all the time?
The third day he rose again from the dead.
He ascended into safety of abstraction, away from having to feel this, from dealing with this,
And sits, maybe sprawls, on the right hand of God the Father Almighty.
I believe in me; I believe in the Spirit, Sophia, wisdom...
The holy catholic (i.e., everybody) Church;
The Communion of saints; does this mean me?
LOVE
The Forgiveness of sins (but I still feel shame); (don't you?)
The Resurrection of the body.
I believe in singing the body electric
And the life everlasting,
A life we find right here in our midst”
― Peter Rollins, The Idolatry of God: Breaking Our Addiction to Certainty and Satisfaction

“The heart has its reasons which reason knows not.”
― Blaise Pascal

“Humans have such a powerful need that their own belief structure be the TRUE belief. If it gives you pleasure, or a sense of security, and it is incorporated into your belief structure, what a powerful dependency that creates.”
― Frank Herbert, Heretics of Dune

“Hey, God! I hope you’re there.
I want you to hear my prayer.
That graven image on my shelf;
Is it really you or just myself?
Well, anyway, here it goes:
Please keep me on my toes.
Help me past my worst mistakes,
Doing it for both our sakes,
For an example of perfection
To the Proctors of my section;
Or merely for the Heaven of it,
Like bread, for the leaven of it.
For whatever reason may incline,
Please act for yours and mine.”
― Frank Herbert, Chapterhouse: Dune

“Ah, happiness courts the light so we deem the world is gay. But misery hides aloof so we deem that misery there is none.”
― Herman Melville, Bartleby the Scrivener

“Law is just religion for atheists, dear. It’s equally shot full of contradictory nonsense.”
― Karen Traviss, Halo: Mortal Dictata

“I find myself still softly searching for my delinquent palaces.”
― Emily Dickinson

“There remained facts which no curse or prayer or litany could wash from existence. Flight would not leave such facts behind, they could not be ignored.”
― Frank Herbert

“The enemy? His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he comes from, and if he really was evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home, or he would not rather have stayed there... in peace? War will make corpses of us all.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien

“I dreamed about my mom. Does that happen to you? You dream about people who have died- only they're still alive, and everything is lovely, or at least normal. And then you wake up, and you wonder how it can be that you saw them, that you heard them, that you touched them. They were there, and now they are gone again. And realizing that makes the hurt stab knife-sharp. I truly don't know what is worse, the nightmares or those dreams.”
― John Green, Looking for Alaska

“What happens when you think like a Fremen?
'You remember that you should never be in company that you wouldn't want to die with.”
― Frank Herbert, God Emperor of Dune

“Stuff your eyes with wonder," he said, "live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal. And if there were, it would be related to the great sloth which hangs upside down in a tree all day every day, sleeping its life away. To hell with that," he said, "shake the tree and knock the great sloth down on his ass.”
― Ray Bradbury

“I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we aren't happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively KNEW was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help.”
― Ray Bradbury

“If eternity touched you, if all the trappings of time and self were stripped away and you were all soul, if God "happened" to you-then isn't it possible that the experience could not be translated back into the land of pumps is and pickup trucks, the daily round wherein we use words like self and soul, revelation and conversion, as if we knew what those words meant?”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“It follows that if you believe at fifty what you believed at fifteen, then you have not lived-or have denied the reality of your life.
To admit that there may be some psychological need informing your return to faith does not preclude or diminish the spiritual imperative, any more than acknowledging the chemical aspects of sexual attraction lessens the mystery of enduring human love. Faith cannot save you from the claims of reason, except insofar as it preserves and protects that wonderful, terrible time when reason, if only for a moment, lost its claim on you.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“Faith is not a hard, unchanging thing you cling to through the vicissitudes of life. Those who try to make it into this are destined to become brittle, shatterable creatures. Faith never grows harder, never so deviates from its nature and becomes actually destructive, than in the person who refuses to admit that faith is change.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“And still: some who cry the name of Christ//Live more remote from love//Than some who cry to a void they cannot name.

-After Dante”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“Sorrow is so woven through us, so much a part of our souls, or at least any understanding of our souls that we are able to attain, that every experience is dyed with its color.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“In the conclusion of his "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" sermon, Johnathan Edwards says, "The axe is in an extraordinary manner laid at the root of the trees, that every tree that brings not forth good fruit, may be hewn down, and cast into the fire." And I say "Amen." I thank God that the theological tree that produced the bitter fruit of belief in an angry, violent, and retributive God has at last been hewn down and cast into the fire. In my life the poisonous tree of angry God theology is now gone. In its place grows the tree of Life, a tree whose leaves bring healing. It's a tree that looks like it once may have been an ugly cross, but it is now beautiful and verdant, producing the fruit of eternal life. Planted by the Father himself, this tree is an everlasting reminder that I am a forgiven sinner in the hands of a loving God.”
― Brian Zahnd, Sinners in the Hands of a Loving God: The Scandalous Truth of the Very Good News

“What does faith mean, finally, at this late date? I often feel that it means no more than, and no less than, faith in life- in the ongoingness of it, the indestructibility, some atom-by-atom intelligence that is and isn't us, some day-by-day and death-by-death persistence insisting on a more-than-human hope, some tender and terrible energy that is, for those with eyes to see it, love.... and I feel that to be faithful to her, faithful to this person that I loved as much as I have ever loved anyone, I must believe in the scope and momentum of her life, not the awful and anomalous instant if her death. In truth, it is not difficult at all. Nor is the other belief- or instinct, really- that occurs simultaneously: that her every tear was wiped away, that God looked her out of pain, that in the book of an eye the world opened its tenderest interiors, and let her in.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“So long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon evidence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.”
― Christian Wiman

“And whenever people claim that one group is in, saved, accepted by God, forgiven, enlightened, redeemed- and everybody else isn't- why is it that those who make this claim are almost always part of the group that's "in"?”
― Rob Bell

“If this understanding of the good news of Jesus prevailed among Christians, the belief that Jesus’s message is about how to get somewhere else, you could possibly end up with a world in which millions of people were starving, thirsty, and poor; the earth was being exploited and polluted; disease and despair were everywhere; and Christians weren’t known for doing much about it. If it got bad enough, you might even have people rejecting Jesus because of how his followers lived. That would be tragic.”
― Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

“Often times when I meet atheists and we talked about the god they don't believe in, we quickly discover that I don't believe in that god either.”
― Rob Bell

“Life is short, we say, in one way or another, but in truth, because we cannot imagine our own death until it is thrust upon us, we live in a land where only other people die.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer

“The gospel Jesus spreads in the book of Luke has as one of its main themes that Jesus brings a social revolution, in which the previous systems and hierarchies of clean and unclean, sinner and saved, and up and down don't mean what they used to. God is doing a new work through Jesus, calling all people to human solidarity. Everybody is a brother, a sister. Equals, children of the God who shows no favouritism.

To reject this new social order was to reject Jesus, the very movement of God in flesh and blood.”
― Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

“Of all the conceptions of the divine, of all the language Jesus could put on the lips of the God character in the story he tells, that’s what he has the Father say. “You are always with me, and everything I have is yours.” ...

Millions of people in our world were told that God so loved the world, that God sent his son to save the world, and that if they accept and believe in Jesus, then they’ll be able to have a relationship with God...

But there’s more. Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them "the gospel" does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God will have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell... A loving heavenly father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormentor who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony... if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, acceptable, awful reality... sometimes the reason people have a problem accepting the gospel is that they sense that the God lurking behind Jesus isn’t safe, loving, or good. It doesn’t make sense, it can’t be reconciled, and so they say no... God creates, because the endless joy and peace and shared life at the heart of this God knows no other way. Jesus invites us into THAT relationship, the one at the center of the universe... so when the gospel is diminished to a question of whether or not a person will “get into heaven,” that reduces the good news to a ticket, a way to get past the bouncer and into the club. The good news is better than that. (excerpts all from chapter 7)”
― Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

“To say that one must live in uncertainty doesn’t begin to get at a tenuous, precarious nature of faith. The minute you begin to speak with certitude about God, he is gone. We praise people for having strong faith, but strength is only one part of that physical metaphor: one also needs FLEXIBILITY.”
― Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer