The collection / 83 fragments

The living archive

Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

SearchTypeTopicEraCulture / collection labelCountry attributionTraditionOrder

Author

Leave empty for every voice. Browse all authors ↗

Reset

Culture labels and country attributions follow the source collections; earliest origins may be unknown.

83 results · Page 2 of 4Play this collection ▷

01Undated

When their minds mingle with His magnanimity, something of eternity rubs off on their imaginations.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

02Undated

Press them continually with memory and dream and have them waste their Present there.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

03Undated

It was like magic, but so much of magic is about misdirection, whereas so much of redemption is straightforward and ordinary, piercing true and lit with surprise.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

04Undated

Indeed, if their wristbands asked them the question: “What-Would-Jesus-Buy”—well now, that could very well revolutionize the Christian church in America.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

05Undated

And keep them thinking in terms of 'being good' as this is not an end so much as a means to something else —happiness, respect, self-esteem, etc… And whatever their true end is, take it away, and so goes their goodness.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

06Undated

You don’t change the world by telling it what to do, sitting at home, and telling it what you believe. You believe by throwing yourself into it. Making a leap, getting involved, then waiting, taking some one person’s place for a while, one suffering person at a time.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

07Undated

Your suffering only matters if it connects you to the suffering of others, if it heals them too.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

08Undated

If we blind them to The Adversary —decrease their desire for The Desire— while at the same time encourage them to do anything else they desire with increasing “freedom of choice,” then eventually we snuff out desire while leaving demand in tact.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

09Undated

They think that if they were allowed to do anything they desired, they would be satisfied and the more desires the better. But all desires divorced from The Desire eventually collapse in on themselves.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

10Undated

If God’s suggesting that I am expected to do good and also obligated to manufacture a genuine desire for it, this boat’s sunk, still sitting on the trailer in the driveway. A stack of things need to happen before I desire to be good…

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

11Undated

Grace runs downhill and now all his time is being redeemed.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

12Undated

Turning an experience about to observe it, results in a lessening of the experience directly proportional to the amount of observation. To think about it is, to some degree, to stop the pleasure, to stop the experience, to step outside it.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

13Undated

Though I despise it, I do not doubt His Love for the creatures. I have seen it —His ever-reaching outward for any hand that might reach back. At His love, I tremble yet believe.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

14Undated

With Truth, Reason, and Morality off the board, we then capture their last Rook —that prissy little virtue, Temperance— for she depends on those other three for her beauty and was thus left wholly undefended.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

15Undated

Everyone needs to calm down! Okay, you got a weird cookie. So what? I don’t mean to swat your ego here, buddy, but this smacks a little narcissistic for me. God is not trying to communicate to you through a cookie. It doesn’t work that way. God’s not all Jack-and-the-magic-beans and tooth-beneath-the pillow voodoo. You don’t just close your eyes, flap open your Bible, and slam a steak knife into a verse. It’s that sort of thinking that leads to witch trials and Senate probes.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

16Undated

The Bible is the one book we’ve most succeeded in having them never read as a book. Keep it that way.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

17Undated

Still, despite all our noise, this universe hinges on a melody, that’s the dismal truth of it. Oh, we can propagandize all we wish, it doesn’t change the fabric of things. This universe was not made for the fallen, only the redeemed.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

18Undated

Also, always encourage 'being good' over 'doing good.' Acts of goodness are the difficulty for us and should, of course, be avoided. 'Being good' is far less problematic, largely because it lacks definition and can be solely a state of mind completely unattached to reality.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

19Undated

I don’t even like the phrase ‘opportunity to sin’ because it implies the opportunity to obey.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

20Undated

I shouldn’t need to remind you that it was words that created the universe and The Word that now holds it together. While your man was simply reading one little book, something not unlike Genesis was stirring in his skull, and you didn’t think to stop it?

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

21Undated

It seems The Adversary needs neither their guilt nor their request, but simply their return. In other words, since repentance is the process whereby guilt is turned into gratitude, He doesn’t mind if they skip a step and go directly to gratitude.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

22Undated

That sense of entitlement is precisely where we want them because the right to happiness is directly opposed to one of The Adversary’s greatest curatives —gratitude.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

23Undated

Gratitude, not guilt, as motivation is always His starting point, thus guilt as a motivation leads nowhere.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗

24Undated

Never let them try out this gratitude, for they would immediately discover that it supplies the first and most important component to happiness: Contentment.

Geoffrey Wood / quote

↗