Author: ppadmin

Thomas Carlyle

Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand. — Thomas Carlyle

dallasnews.com

When Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News wanted to find the origins of Kum-ba-ya, he talked with ethnomusicologist Thomas Miller, who said the song originated as a spiritual among the Gullah, an African-American people who live in the Sea Islands and the coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. It’s believed that a missionary couple transported the song to Angola, where it was rediscovered and brought back to the US in the ‘50s and ‘60s. — dallasnews.com

Howard Zinn

Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of leaders . . . and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves . . . (and) the grand thieves are running the country. That’s our problem. — Howard Zinn

John Henry Newman

Lead, Kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom, Lead me Thou on! The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on! Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step is enough for me. — John Henry Newman

Snuffy Smith cartoon

Snuffy and his son Jughaid are sitting on a mountain ledge peering into a brilliant, starry sky. "Behold th’ bodacious cosmos, Judhaid!!” Snuffy says to his son. “Makes ya feel purty insignificant, don’t it?!” Jughaid replies, “Nope!!” “Fergot” Snuffy says, “yo’re parta that selfy-stem gen’ration, ain’t cha?!” — Snuffy Smith cartoon

Vincent van Gogh

Let us go forward quietly, forever making for the light, and lifting up our hearts in the knowledge that we are as others are (and that others are as we are), and that it is right to love one another in the best possible way – believing all things, hoping for all things, and enduring all things. . . . And let us not be too troubled by our weaknesses, for even he who has none, has one weakness, namely that he thinks he has none, and anyone who believes himself to be so perfect or wise would do well to become foolish all over again. — Vincent van Gogh

Parker Palmer

Vocation does not come from willfulness. It comes from listening. Of course, the voice we listen for is not “out there,” it is “in here,” calling me to fulfill the selfhood given me at birth by God. Rabbi Zusya, when he was an old man, said, “In the coming world, they will not ask me: ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me: ‘Why were you not Zusya?’” — Parker Palmer

Marian Wright Edelman

Asked why she wrote Guide My Feet: This book kind of wrote itself. I started off trying to write a policy book, and while prayer has been an integral part of my life without which I couldn’t survive, it would never have occurred to me to pray out loud or to write a book about prayer and meditations. But, you know, as I sat down to try to write chapters to respond or struggle with Dr. King’s question in his last book—where do we go from here, chaos of community?—I got terrible writer’s cramp and I would find prayers and meditations tumbling out, and so I just let go and let come out what will, and the result is this. I think it reflects my own worry about the spiritual famine in our country.

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Carl Sandburg

There are some people who can receive a truth by no other way than to have their understanding shocked and insulted. — Carl Sandburg