Cassandra Chung

“Is not the loss of this 'moral memory' (a horrid expression) responsible for the ruin of all obligations, of love, marriage, friendship and loyalty? Nothing sticks fast, nothing holds firm; everything is here today and gone tomorrow. But the good things of life- truth, justice, and beauty- all great accomplishments need time; constancy, and 'memory', or they degenerate. The man who feels neither responsibility towards the past nor desire to shape the future is one who 'forgets', and I don't know how one can really get at such a person and bring him to his senses.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“Marriage, work, state, and church all have their definite divine mandate; but what about culture and education? I don't think they can just be classified under work, however tempting that might be in many ways.

They belong, not to the sphere of obedience, but to the broad area of freedom, which surrounds all three spheres of the divine mandates. The man who is ignorant of this area of freedom may be a good father, citizen, and worker, indeed even a Christian; but I doubt whether he is a complete man and therefore a Christian in the widest sense of the term.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison

“In this, Pascal so profoundly pointed out, consists the greatness and the miserableness of man. He longs for truth and is false by nature. He yearns for rest and throws himself from one diversion upon another. He pants for a permanent and eternal bliss and seizes on the pleasures of a moment. He seeks for God and loses himself in the creature. He is a born son of the house and he feeds on the husks of the swine in a strange land. He forsakes the fountain of living waters and hews out broken cisterns that can hold no water (Jer 2:13). He is as a hungry man who dreams that he is eating, and when he awakes finds that his soul is empty; and he is like a thirsty man who dreams that he is drinking, and when he awakes finds that he is faint and that his soul has appetite (Isa 29:8).

Science cannot explain this contradiction in man. It reckons only with his greatness and not with his misery, or only with his misery and not with his greatness. It exalts him too high, or it depresses him too far, for science does not know of his Divine origin, nor of his profound fall. But the Scriptures know of both, and they shed their light over man and over mankind; and the contradictions are reconciled, the mists are cleared, and the hidden things are revealed. Man is an enigma whose solution can be found only in God.”
― Herman Bavinck, The Wonderful Works of God

“I had come to think of Malaysia as a galaxy of stars in a night sky: uncountable motes of brilliance in the dark, each of them shining with an internal light. But each shining alone. Brilliant Malaysians were everywhere: in business, industry, the media, the schools and colleges, the cities, towns and villages. But so many seemed to burn alone, unaware of the existence of others. The key was to link them. Network them. Let each shining light extend a ray of talent and ability to others, conjoining, reinforcing, enfolding each individual seed of potential in a nourishing field of support. When that multitude of stars began irradiating each other, when their light began to mingle, then the night would be transformed into day, and their light would illuminate this nation, and not merely glow in the darkness like a constellation of fanciful dreams.”
― Rehman Rashid, A Malaysian Journey