Anna Laughter > Anna's Quotes

“Dear God,
I am so afraid to open my clenched fists!
Who will I be when I have nothing left to hold on to?
Who will I be when I stand before you with empty hands?
Please help me to gradually open my hands
and to discover that I am not what I own,
but what you want to give me.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, The Only Necessary Thing: Living a Prayerful Life

“All grown-ups were once children... but only few of them remember it.”
― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

“He treats the person as if they were fully whole.
We become what others expect us to be. Dad expected me to get better and even assumed I would have something helpful to say. Funny how we rise and fall to the assumptions of others.”
― Nathan Foster, Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet

“Arrogance and a teachable spirit are mutually exclusive.”
― Nathan Foster, The Making of an Ordinary Saint: My Journey from Frustration to Joy with the Spiritual Disciplines

“The forgotten art of focusing on one task at a time is a treasure, a joy, and the gateway to a life of prayer.”
― Nathan Foster, The Making of an Ordinary Saint: My Journey from Frustration to Joy with the Spiritual Disciplines

“If the spiritual life doesn’t lead us to freedom and grace, then we’ve probably missed the point.”
― Nathan Foster, The Making of an Ordinary Saint: My Journey from Frustration to Joy with the Spiritual Disciplines

“What people so desperately need today is space, stillness and attentiveness," he said. "And what so many churches major in are busyness, hurry and noise. We keep people constantly distracted. Earnest folks who are searching for a deep, intimate life with God end up being put on some church committee! If, instead, we carefully taught people how to create space in their lives and how to listen attentively, we would then incline their hearts toward God. As it is, we often do almost everything and anything but that.”
― Nathan Foster, Wisdom Chaser: Finding My Father at 14,000 Feet

“We live in a culture that defines our value by what we accomplish, what we own, and how we look. I’m struck with the awareness that for the first time in the history of human existence, the majority of our social contact comes in the form of someone trying to sell us something. Is it just a coincidence that the basic message of the most dominant voice in our society is that we are in some way lacking?”
― Nathan Foster, The Making of an Ordinary Saint: My Journey from Frustration to Joy with the Spiritual Disciplines

“The desperate need today is not for a greater number of intelligent people, or gifted people, but for deep people.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“We really must understand that the lust for affluence in contemporary society is psychotic. It is psychotic because it has completely lost touch with reality. We crave things we neither need nor enjoy. 'We buy things we do not want to impress people we do not like.' ...It is time to awaken to the fact that conformity to a sick society is to be sick.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“A farmer is helpless to grow grain; all he can do is provide the right conditions for the growing of grain. He cultivates the ground, he plants the seed, he waters the plants, and then the natural forces of the earth take over and up comes the grain...This is the way it is with the Spiritual Disciplines - they are a way of sowing to the Spirit... By themselves the Spiritual Disciplines can do nothing; they can only get us to the place where something can be done.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“List of Artists Who Created Fantasy Worlds to Try and Cure Bouts of Sadness

1. Italo Calvino
2. Gabriel Garcia Marquez
3. Jim Henson and Jorge Luis Borges - Labyrinths
4. The creator of MySpace
5. Richard Brautigan
6. J.K. Rowling
7. The inventor of the children's toy Lite-Brite
8. Ann Sexton
9. David Foster Wallace
10. Gaugin and the Caribbean
11. Charles Schulz
12. Liam Rector”
― Shane Jones, Light Boxes

“Love, not anger, brought Jesus to the cross. Golgotha came as a result of God's great desire to forgive, not his reluctance. Jesus knew that by his vicarious suffering he could actually absorb all the evil of humanity and so heal it, forgive it, redeem it.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“Nothing disciplines the inordinate desires of the flesh like service, and nothing transforms the desires of the flesh like serving in hiddenness. The flesh whines against service but screams against hidden service. It strains and pulls for honour and recognition. It will devise subtle, religiously acceptable means to call attention to the service rendered. If we stoutly refuse to give in to this lust of the flesh, we crucify it. Every time we crucify the flesh, we crucify our pride and arrogance.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“Stop trying to impress people with your clothes and impress them with your life.”
― Richard J. Foster, Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth

“A waiting person is a patient person. The word patience means the willingness to stay where we are and live the situation out to the full in the belief that something hidden there will manifest itself to us.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.”
― Henri Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Every time we make the decision to love someone, we open ourselves to great suffering, because those we most love cause us not only great joy but also great pain. The greatest pain comes from leaving. When the child leaves home, when the husband or wife leaves for a long period of time or for good, when the beloved friend departs to another country or dies … the pain of the leaving can tear us apart.
Still, if we want to avoid the suffering of leaving, we will never experience the joy of loving. And love is stronger than fear, life stronger than death, hope stronger than despair. We have to trust that the risk of loving is always worth taking.”
― Henri Nouwen

“As long as we continue to live as if we are what we do, what we have, and what other people think about us, we will remain filled with judgments, opinions, evaluations, and condemnations. We will remain addicted to putting people and things in their "right" place.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“Let us not underestimate how hard it is to be compassionate. Compassion is hard because it requires the inner disposition to go with others to place where they are weak, vulnerable, lonely, and broken. But this is not our spontaneous response to suffering. What we desire most is to do away with suffering by fleeing from it or finding a quick cure for it.”
― Henri J.M. Nouwen

“You don't think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”
― Henry Nouwen

“I used to be afraid of failing at something that really mattered to me, but now I'm more afraid of succeeding at things that don't matter.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Most people need love and acceptance a lot more than they need advice.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“I used to want to fix people, but now I just want to be with them.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“You don't need a plan; you just need to be present.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“Failure is just part of the process, and it's not just okay; it's better than okay. God doesn't want failure to shut us down. God didn't make it a three-strikes-and-you're-out sort of thing. It's more about how God helps us dust ourselves off so we can swing for the fences again. And all of this without keeping a meticulous record of our screw-ups.”
― Bob Goff, Love Does: Discover a Secretly Incredible Life in an Ordinary World

“The work of paying compassionate attention is, in a sense, learning to steward for ourselves what God already believes about us—that we’re valuable and loved.”
― Aundi Kolber, Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress, and Survival Mode--and into a Life of Connection and Joy

“Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.”
― Gabor Mate, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction