John Powell Quotes - Page 2

Love supposes, is, and does many things, but basically it is practiced in the act of sharing.

The genius of Christian spirituality is to integrate [the] spirit of possession with the spirit of dispossession. The spirit of dispossession implies that all the good and delightful things of this world are never allowed to own, possess, or shackle me. Dispossession implies that I am always free, my own person, liberated from the tyranny that possession can easily exercise over us.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

You can't reinvent yourself for every movie.

He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.

When we contact each other, we change each other. We are constantly making each other.

What are the "ifs" and "buts" that limit my enjoyment of life?

By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go.

We cannot "psychologize" the grace of God. God's actions are outside and above our human sciences.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

God is to us like the sky to a small bird, which cannot see its outer limits and cannot reach its distant horizons, but can only lose itself in the greatness and immensity of the blueness.

You just don't make decisions about what you're going to be like when you are old. I know that I am making that decision right now. Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world and God in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take over in old age. Every time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical old man. Our yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.

Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.

God alone can make a man a believer. Our part is to accept or reject his initiative.

I wanted to play music from the age of seven. I suddenly fell in love with it and that's what I was going to do, or to be involved with music. It was just speaking to me at a level that as a seven year old I suddenly realized the world was capable of supporting in my head a lot more than what I was understanding verbally and visually.

What is disgraceful and outrageous is that 18,000 children die of hunger every day, every one of them a preventable death. That's what the controversy should be about.

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

Playing is much, much harder than composing in my opinion, becoming a player. If you want to be a player for all your life either you decide not to do it professionally and just enjoy it and just do it every weekend, but if you want to be a professional musician- hardest thing I could imagine and I really wasn't capable of doing it.

Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

There's the whole myth about rocket science. It's really not that hard. It's not brain surgery.