Tuuli Platner

“To be cynical is to be distant. While offering a false intimacy of being "in the know," cynicism actually destroys intimacy. It leads to a creeping bitterness that can deaden and even destroy the spirit...
A praying life is just the opposite. It engaged evil. It doesn't take no for an answer. The psalmist was in God's face, hoping, dreaming, asking. Prayer is feisty. Cynicism, on the other hand, merely critiques. It is passive, cocooning itself from the passions of the great cosmic battle we are engaged in. It is without hope.”
― Paul E. Miller, A Praying Life: Connecting with God in a Distracting World

“You are a hero-worshipper, my dear; and if people don't come up to the mark you are so disappointed that you fail to see the fine reality which remains when the pretty romance ends.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott Ultimate Collection: 16 Novels & 150+ Short Stories, Plays and Poems (Illustrated): Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo's Boys, ... The Abbot's Ghost, A Garland for Girls…

“Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New.”
― Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

“Many men can be what the world calls great: very few men are what God calls good. This is the harder task to choose, yet the only success that satisfies, the only honor that outlives death.”
― Louisa May Alcott, Louisa May Alcott Ultimate Collection: 16 Novels & 150+ Short Stories, Plays and Poems (Illustrated): Little Women, Good Wives, Little Men, Jo's Boys, ... The Abbot's Ghost, A Garland for Girls…