Category Archives ⇒ Quote of the Day

March 16, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Now I was come up in spir­it through the flam­ing sword into the par­adise of God. All things were new, and all the cre­ation gave anoth­er smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter.

— George Fox, 1648

March 10, 2018
· Martin Kelley

There will always be con­flict. It’s easy to get dis­tract­ed by fires. It helps to be a calm­ing pres­ence in these sit­u­a­tions to keep the orga­ni­za­tion focused and keep your col­leagues at peace.

— Col­in Sax­ton [Source]

March 9, 2018
· Martin Kelley

That one final­ly becomes the thing he vio­lent­ly fights is a fact that Hitler under­stood, in 1933, when he said, “The great strength of the total­i­tar­i­an state is that it forces those who fear it to imi­tate it.” It would be a trag­ic thing indeed if we Amer­i­cans were stripped of our free­dom by a for­eign and aggres­sive pow­er; it is all the more trag­ic that we grad­u­al­ly and some­what unknow­ing­ly give up our free­doms, one after anoth­er, in the pur­suit of that force which we claim will guard our liberty.

— Bayard Rustin [Source]

March 8, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Only wait to know that where­in God appears in thy heart, even the holy seed, the immor­tal seed of life; that that may be dis­cerned, dis­tin­guished, and have scope in thee; that it may spring up in thy heart, and live in thee, and gath­er thee into itself, and leav­en thee all over with its nature; that thou mayst be a new lump, and mayst walk before God, not in the old­ness of thy own lit­er­al knowl­edge or appre­hen­sions of things, but in the new­ness of his Spirit.

— Isaac Pen­ing­ton [Source]

March 7, 2018
· Martin Kelley

There­fore hear instruc­tion and be wise, while the good Spir­it of the Lord is nigh to teach you; seek ye the Lord while he may be found, call ye upon him while he is near; and refuse not to hear­ken to his heav­en­ly Ora­cle in your Consciences.

— Eliz­a­beth Bathurst [Source via Isa­iah]

March 6, 2018
· Martin Kelley

What we do as we wor­ship and live and do our busi­ness togeth­er, is we learn those skills and abil­i­ties joint­ly that enable us to mod­el the King­dom of God to the rest of the world. This is our tes­ti­mo­ny as a gath­ered peo­ple. And we do so by tak­ing the seeds of that learn­ing out beyond the con­fines of our month­ly meet­ings and begin to trans­form the world out­side the Reli­gious Soci­ety of Friends.

— Lloyd Lee Wil­son [Source / HT]

March 5, 2018
· Martin Kelley

Noth­ing, I believe, can real­ly teach us the nature and mean­ing of inspi­ra­tion but per­son­al expe­ri­ence of it. That we may all have such expe­ri­ence if we will but attend to the divine influ­ences in our own hearts, is the car­di­nal doc­trine of Quakerism.

— Car­o­line Stephen