Mike Mullen > Mike's Quotes

“Sometimes,' said Pooh, 'the smallest things take up the most room in your heart.”
― A.A. Milne

“Prayer without study would be empty. Study without prayer would be blind.”
― Karl Barth, Evangelical Theology: An Introduction

“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“As ministers we ought to speak of God. We are human, however, and so cannot speak of God. We ought therefore to recognize both our obligation and our inability and by that very recognition give glory to God”
― Karl Barth

“...'joy' in Phillippians is a defiant 'Nevertheless!' that Paul sets like a full stop against the Philippians' anxiety...”
― Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Philippians

“ The Paradoxical Commandments

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.”
― Kent M. Keith, The Silent Revolution: Dynamic Leadership in the Student Council

“Let your fiction grow out of the land beneath your feet.”
― Willa Cather

“The theologian who labors without joy is not a theologian at all. Sulky faces, morose thoughts and boring ways of speaking are intolerable in this field.”
― Karl Barth

“It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of Creation and it turns to radiance - for a moment or a year or the span of a life. And then it sinks back into itself again, and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire, or light .... Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don't have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see. Only, who could have the courage to see it? .... Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave - that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

“We read to know we're not alone.”
― William Nicholson, Shadowlands: A Play

“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange Land

“Will God ever ask you to do something you are not able to do? The answer is yes--all the time! It must be that way, for God's glory and kingdom. If we function according to our ability alone, we get the glory; if we function according to the power of the Spirit within us, God gets the glory. He wants to reveal Himself to a watching world.”
― Henry Blackaby, Experiencing the Spirit: The Power of Pentecost Every Day

“The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
― Mother Teresa

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
― Neil Gaiman, Coraline

“You don’t have a soul, Doctor. You are a soul. You have a body, temporarily.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz

“I didn't come out of a cereal box. ”
― Bob Dylan

“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

“You're gonna have to serve somebody; well, it may be the devil, or it may be the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve somebody...”
― Bob Dylan

“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.”
― Willa Cather

“I was so much older then; I'm younger than that now.

From the back pages”
― Bob Dylan

“A university is just a group of buildings gathered around a library.”
― Shelby Foote

“Some people feel the rain. Others just get wet.”
― Bob Dylan

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”
― A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh

“By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet. ”
― Thomas Merton

“How do you spell 'love'?" - Piglet
"You don't spell it...you feel it." - Pooh”
― A.A. Milne

“Although your mind works, your heart is
darkened with depravity; and without a pure heart there can be no complete and
true consciousness”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“Only the pure of heart can make a good soup.”
― Beethoven