Knowledge of any value can't be given.

It must be sought and earned. 

Rick Riordan. The Serpent's Shadow.

Flat Universality or A Glorious Topography

An ideal society is not one that seeks to level the differences into a flat universality but one that welcomes them into a glorious topography of diverse human flourishing.

Maria Popova. Brain Pickings

We are given a sensual life, an imaginative life, an affective life, and a noetic life, and each of these features of selfhood has to pass through transformation and purification en route to the vision of God.

PRAYER AS DIVINE PROPULSION: AN INTERVIEW WITH SARAH COAKLEY, PART I

The laboratory check for spiritual experience is life itself, and it is exactly here in the most appallingly dangerous and painful situations, that I have found faith both sure and radiant. 

 J.B. Phillips. RING OF TRUTH.

'Orthodoxy' as mere propositional assent needs to be distinguished from 'orthodoxy' as a demanding, and ongoing, spiritual project, in which the language of the creeds is personally and progressively assimilated.

Sarah Coakley. GOD, SEXUALITY, AND THE SELF.

To gain entire likeness to Christ, I ought to get a high esteem of the happiness of it. 

I am persuaded that God's happiness is inseparably linked in with his holiness. Holiness and happiness are like light and heat. God never tasted one of the pleasures of sin. Christ had a body such as I have, yet he never tasted one of the pleasures of sin. The redeemed, through all eternity, will never taste one of the pleasures of sin; yet their happiness is complete.... Every sin is something away from my greatest enjoyment... The devil strives night and day to make me forget this or disbelieve it. He says, Why should you not enjoy this pleasure as much as Solomon or David? You may go to heaven also. I am persuaded that this is a lie - that my true happiness is to go and sin no more. 

Robert Murray M'Cheyne. Biography compiled by Andrew Bonar. 

#overheard @acoffeeshopinTN

She's the Yankee of the family so she's not passive aggressive, she's just aggressive aggressive."

 A writer learns more from what he writes than the reader, and often applies the perspectives after the book is written... I hope something like my experience in writing this book happens to you in the reading.

Donald Miller. TO OWN A DRAGON. Prologue.

...man is destroyed only by his sin and can be healed only by forgiveness.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer. LIFE TOGETHER.

If your plan is for one year plant rice. 

If your plan is for ten years plant trees. 

If your plan is for one hundred years educate children.

Confucius quoted by Dhiraj