QUOTES

I keep a running document on my computer of quotes that I like. I didn't predetermine the subjects I wanted the quotes to be about, but they mostly talk about self-improvement. That's a little embarrassing, I think. Here are some of them:

"Take this rule: whatever weakens your reason, impairs the tenderness of your conscience, obscures your sense of God, or takes off the relish of spiritual things; in short, whatever increases the strength and authority of your body over mind, that thing is sin to you, however innocent it may be in itself." - Susanna Wesley, mother of John Wesley (founder of Methodism) and Charles Wesley (famous writer of protestant hymns, like "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" and "Christ The Lord Is Risen Today")

“Were man but constant, he were perfect”

Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (adjusted a little by me)

‎"I must return to the mountains—to Yosemite. I am told that the winter storms there will not be easily borne, but I am bewitched, enchanted, and tomorrow I must start for the great temple to listen to the winter songs and sermons preached and sung only there." - John Muir

“The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light within light. It seems like a metaphor for Something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point.

“It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I’ll try to remember to use this. I believe I see a place for it in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation.” –Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, pg. 119

“I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the ultimate triumph.” – Theodore Roosevelt on the strenuous life