Home > Topic > the presence
41 " If you can feed in the presence of your enemies, if you can be blessed under the weight of burdens, when you praise God in pain, it is preparation for provision. "
42 " When you learn to have the heart of praise in the presence of your enemies, you set the table; if you can work with God in darkness enough depending on the light that He showed you in the last season, you will learn to read your enemies as a sign that it is time to eat. ( a bit deep). Whenever you sense a crisis in your life, note that your harvest is near. "
43 " God prepared a table before me in the presence of my insecurity, in the presence of my deficits, in the presence of my addictions, in the presence of my confusions, in the presence of what I have lost, in the presence of the threat that I won't make it, in the presence of my enemies, I am looking straight ahead. "
44 " Learn to eat with your enemies all around you but most of all thank God for his presence. Keep your eyes fixed to the presence of God in the presence of your enemies. "
45 " Blind barthimus used his mouth and his feet to affect what wasn't working in his life? What do you use to affect what's not working in your life? God is not interested in your perfection, He is interested in your participation. It is your participation that attracts the presence of God. "
46 " Why do people go to church on Sundays? A question that is very complicated because I know what the answer is supposed to be but I do not really know the answer.. I think people go because it is a kind of tradition. I think some goes because someone told them if tgey do not they might go to hell. Maybe some go to look for a wife or husband ☺. Maybe some go to church to display their latest designer shoes or handbags. Some goes just to please their Pastor. Some people go to church because they love the music or the preaching. Some goes because of some social reasons and friendship. Some have it in their mind that they will experience the presence of God in the church. Some goes to church because of miracle. Some goes to church when they are expecting something maybe child, comfort, marriage, work etc.. Some felt it is an obligation to give God a day out of the seven days he createdLet me tell you that church is not there to entertain you, Ephesians 3:20... there are things going on in the church that some people barely know about.Ask yourself today why do I go to church. I am sure a sincere answer will help you. "
47 " It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world. You make close friends. You become part of a tribe and you share the same blood- you give it together, you take it together. "
― Tim O'Brien , The Things They Carried
48 " Bushido is realized in the presence of death. This means choosing death whenever there is a choice between life and death. There is no other reasoning. "
― Yamamoto Tsunetomo , Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
49 " Tirelessly they flew on and on, and tirelessly she kept pace. She felt a fierce joy possessing her, that she could command these immortal presences. And she rejoiced in her blood and flesh, in the rough pine bark she felt next to her skin, in the beat of her heart and the life of all her senses, and in the hunger she was feeling now, and in the presence of her sweet-voiced bluethroat dæmon, and in the earth below her and the lives of every creature, plant and animal both; and she delighted in being of the same substance as them, and in knowing that when she died her flesh would nourish other lives as they had nourished her. "
― Philip Pullman , The Subtle Knife (His Dark Materials, #2)
50 " The Peace of Wild ThingsWhen despair for the world grows in meand I wake in the night at the least soundin fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,I go and lie down where the wood drakerests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.I come into the peace of wild thingswho do not tax their lives with forethoughtof grief. I come into the presence of still water.And I feel above me the day-blind starswaiting with their light. For a timeI rest in the grace of the world, and am free. "
― Wendell Berry , The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
51 " A billion stars go spinning through the night,glittering above your head,But in you is the presence that will bewhen all the stars are dead. "
― Rainer Maria Rilke , The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
52 " The first fact of the world is that it repeats itself. I had been taught to believe that the freshness of children lay in their capacity for wonder at the vividness and strangeness of the particular, but what is fresh in them is that they still experience the power of repetition, from which our first sense of the power of mastery comes. Though predictable is an ugly little world in daily life, in our first experience of it we are clued to the hope of a shapeliness in things. To see that power working on adults, you have to catch them out: the look of foolish happiness on the faces of people who have just sat down to dinner is their knowledge that dinner will be served. Probably, that is the psychological basis for the power and the necessity of artistic form...Maybe our first experience of form is the experience of our own formation...And I am not thinking mainly of poems about form; I’m thinking of the form of a poem, the shape of its understanding. The presence of that shaping constitutes the presence of poetry. "
― Robert Hass
53 " We worship…the powers that speak to our souls, if it seems they do. We do so knowing there is more to the world, and the half-world, and perhaps worlds beyond, than we can grasp. We always knew that. We can’t even stop children from dying, how would we presume to understand the truth of things? Behind things? Does the presence of one power deny another? [p. 176] "
― Guy Gavriel Kay , Sailing to Sarantium (The Sarantine Mosaic, #1)
54 " A voice said, " Climb." And he said, " How shall I climb?the mountains are so steep that I cannot climb." The voice said, " Climb or die." He said, " But how?I see no way up those steep ascents. This that is asked is too hard for me." The voice said, " Climb, or perish, soul and body of theemind and spirit of thee. There is no second chance for any son of man. Climb or die." Then he remembered that he had read in the books of the bravest climbers on the hills of the earth that sometimes they were aware of the presence of a Companion on the mountains who was not one of the earthly party of climbers. And he rememberd a word in the Book of Mountaineers...it heartened him,for it told him that he was created to walk in precarious places, not on the easy levels of life. "
55 " David is called a man after God's heart. This can be a little confusing when you get into his story, because he's guilty of adultery and murder and cover-up. He's a train wreck as a husband, and he's worse as a dad. But his heart belongs to God. His whole life is immersed in the presence and story of God. What lights him up is to serve God and love God, and when he mess up—and he does—he repents and wants to get right with God again. "
― John Ortberg , All the Places to Go . . . How Will You Know?: God Has Placed before You an Open Door. What Will You Do?
56 " ... helping each other to have a true gaze on reality, on the circumstances we are living in, is the first gesture of friendship we can offer each other for living like human beings in the presence of the needs of the world. "
57 " There is no excuse for anyone to write fiction for public consumption unless he has been called to do so by the presence of a gift. It is the nature of fiction not to be good for much unless it is good in itself. "
― Flannery O'Connor , Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
58 " How can so many (white, male) writers narratively justify restricting the agency of their female characters on the grounds of sexism = authenticity while simultaneously writing male characters with conveniently modern values?The habit of authors writing Sexism Without Sexists in genre novels is seemingly pathological. Women are stuffed in the fridge under cover of " authenticity" by secondary characters and villains because too many authors flinch from the " authenticity" of sexist male protagonists. Which means the yardstick for " authenticity" in such novels almost always ends up being " how much do the women suffer" , instead of - as might also be the case - " how sexist are the heroes" .And this bugs me; because if authors can stretch their imaginations far enough to envisage the presence of modern-minded men in the fake Middle Ages, then why can't they stretch them that little bit further to put in modern-minded women, or modern-minded social values? It strikes me as being extremely convenient that the one universally permitted exception to this species of " authenticity" is one that makes the male heroes look noble while still mandating that the women be downtrodden and in need of rescuing.-Comment at Staffer's Book Review 4/18/2012 to " Michael J. Sullivan on Character Agency "
59 " Silence is the language of Om. We need silence to be able to reach our Self. Both internal and external silence is very important to feel the presence of that supreme Love. "
― Amit Ray , Om Chanting and Meditation
60 " When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity? "
― Seneca