I can’t get enough of great quotes.  Here are a just a few of my all time favorites…

“All these searchings and hungerings and longings that are in your heart, I tell you, they are the drawings of the divine magnet, Christ Jesus.”  Andrew Murray

“Religion insists that compassion is the whole purpose of any sort of spirituality or morality or ethics. When religion fails at compassion, it fails at its own test.”  Diana Butler Bass

“There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” Desmond Tutu

“The bread which you do not use is the bread of hungry. The garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of the one who is naked. The shoes that you do not wear are the shoes of the one who is barefoot. The money you keep locked away is the money of the poor. The acts of charity you do not perform are so much injustices you commit.” St. Basil

“We may be surprised at the people we find in heaven. God has a soft spot for sinners. His standards are quite low.”  Desmond Tutu

“A Church that doesn’t provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of society in which it is being proclaimed, what gospel is that?” Oscar Romero

“You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”  Anne Lamott

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”  Augustine

“Grace is costly because it calls us to follow, and it is grace because it calls us to follow Jesus Christ. It is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life…Grace is costly because it compels a man to submit to the yoke of Christ and follow him; it is grace because Jesus says: “My yoke is easy and my burden is light.”  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“Our place of calling is generally where our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”  Frederick Buechner

“In our day heaven and earth are on tiptoe waiting for the emerging of a Spirit-led, Spirit-empowered people.  All creation watches expectantly for the springing up a disciplined, freely gathered, martyr people who know in this life the life and power of the Kingdom of God. It has happened before.  It can happen again.”  Richard Foster

If I were to wish for anything I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of what can be, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating as possibility. SØREN KIERKEGAARD

“When you discover what you will be in your life, set out to do it as if God Almighty called you at this particular moment in history to do it. don’t just set out to do a good job. Set out to do such a good job that the living, the dead or the unborn couldn’t do it any better.  If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, sweep streets like Leontyne Price sings before the Metropolitan Opera. Sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say: Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”  C.S. Lewis

“The gospel is absurd and the life of Jesus is meaningless unless we believe that He lived, died, and rose again with but one purpose in mind: to make brand-new creation. Not to make people with better morals but to create a community of prophets and professional lovers, men and women who would surrender to the mystery of the fire of the Spirit that burns within, who would live in ever greater fidelity to the omnipresent Word of God, who would enter into the center of it all, the very heart and mystery of Christ, into the center of the flame that consumes, purifies, and sets everything aglow with peace, joy, boldness, and extravagant, furious love. This, my friend, is what it really means to be a Christian.”  Brennan Manning

“I have no idea where I am going.  I do not see the road ahead of me.  I cannot know for certain where it will end.  Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.  But I believe that my desire to please you does in fact please you.  And I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.  I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.  And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it.  Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death.  I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”  Thomas Merton

“You are Christian only so long as you constantly pose critical questions to the society you live in, so long as you emphasize the need of conversion both for yourself and for the world, so long as you in no way let yourself become established in the situation of the world, so long as you stay unsatisfied with the status quo and keep saying that a new world is yet to come. You are Christian only when you believe you have a role to play in the realization of the new kingdom, and when you urge everyone you meet with holy unrest to make haste so that the promise might soon be fulfilled. So long as you live as a Christian you keep looking for a new order, a new structure, a new life.”  Henri Nouwen

“A Christian, if he is not a revolutionary in this time, he is not a Christian.”  Pope Francis

“Some want to live within the sound of church or chapel bell; I want to run a rescue shop within a yard of hell.”  C.T. Studd

“When I was young I was sure of everything; in a few years, having been mistaken a thousand times, I was not half so sure of most things as I was before; at present, I am hardly sure of anything but what God has revealed to me.”  John Wesley

“Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world.”  Dallas Willard

“We can’t build the kingdom by our own efforts; it will take another mighty act of our God to bring it in at the last.  But we can build for the kingdom.  Every act of justice, every word of truth, every creation of genuine beauty, every act of self-sacrificial love, will be reaffirmed on the last day, in the new world.”  N.T .Wright

“You have to color outside the lines once in a while if you want to make your life a masterpiece.”  Albert Einstein

“In the beginning God created man in His own image, and man has been trying to repay the favor ever since.”  Voltaire

“You can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.” Anne Lamott

“What you encounter, recognize, or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach… when our approach is respectful, sensitive and worthy, gifts of healing, challenge and creativity open to us.  A gracious approach is the key that unlocks the treasure of encounter.” John O’Donohue

“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.” C.S. Lewis

“An authentic faith – which is never comfortable or completely personal – always involves a deep desire to change the world, to transmit values, to leave this earth somehow better than we found it.”  Pope Francis

“One of the principal rules of religion is, to lose no occasion of serving God.” John Wesley

“People say, what is the sense of our small effort? They cannot see that we must lay one brick at a time, take one step at a time. A pebble cast into a pond causes ripples that spread in all directions. Each one of our thoughts, words and deeds is like that. No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” Dorothy Day

“Be kind.  Everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”  Ian MacLaren

“We know that every effort to better society, especially when injustice and sin are so ingrained, is an effort that God blesses, that God wants, that God demands of us.” Oscar Romero

“Prophetic spirituality is about living out our faith on the streets of the world, rather than just talking about it.” Joan Chittister

“Pray as if everything depends on God, work as if everything depends on you.” St. Augustine

“Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.” Teresa of Avila

“Who can really be faithful in great things if he has not learned to be faithful in the things of daily life?” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“To move with reverence through all of life, always seeking and finding, always building and rebuilding, always repenting, always rejoicing.  This is to walk with God.” Howard Thurman

“The Church may be a harlot at times, but she is my mother.”  Dorothy Day

“Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.” Dallas Willard