Karen

“Stop chasing the wind! Stop thinking the future will be better and easier. Stop thinking that if only things were different you would be a better person and that one day you will be a better father. You do not know the future or what lies around the corner, whether good or ill. Perhaps these are indeed the very best days of my life. Maybe I’ll be dead tomorrow. Live the life you have now instead of longing for the life you think you will have but which you actually cannot control at all. When we realize there is a middle way between being lazy in the here and now and busting a gut for the future, we find tranquility.”
― David Gibson, Living Life Backward: How Ecclesiastes Teaches Us to Live in Light of the End

“And they saw with amazement the coming of the Children of Ilúvatar, and the habitation that was prepared for them; and they perceived that they themselves in the labour of their music had been busy with the preparation of this dwelling, and yet knew not that it had any purpose beyond its own beauty. For the Children of Ilúvatar were conceived by him alone; and they came with the third theme, and were not in the theme which Ilúvatar propounded at the beginning, and none of the Ainur had part in their making. Therefore when they beheld them, the more did they love them, being things other than themselves, strange and free, wherein they saw the mind of Ilúvatar reflected anew, and learned yet a little more of his wisdom, which otherwise had been hidden even from the Ainur.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion

“In fact, the ongoing and deepening contrast between the Jesus of the Gospels and popular cultural misconfigurations is the principal reason I have written this book. Jesus is far more beautiful than many have imagined. It all has to do with love, but not just any kind of love, but with holy love.” Jesus the Stranger: The Man from Galilee and the Light of the World, p. xviii.”
― Kenneth J. Collins, Jesus the Stranger: The Man from Galilee and the Light of the World

“It was a question of steering Christian dogma between the Scylla of pantheism and the Charybdis of materialism and its logical conclusion, scepticism.”
― Owen Barfield, History in English Words