From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (Jan. 7, 1997) at page 43:
While Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer was imprisoned by the Nazi’s he sent a wedding homily out to two young friends. He celebrated the love that had brought them together, but he added, “It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love.”
From Martin Buber, I And Thou (1970) at page 9:
Our humanity emerges in what he called the “I-thou” relationship, when our ego must make space to accommodate another ego.””
From H.L. Menken, A Book of Burlesques:
The definition of Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere may be happy.”
From Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC:
Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel of both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back – in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.”
From Alexander Pope, Thoughts on Various Subjects:
To be angry is to revenge the fault of others upon yourselves.”
From G.K. Chesterton:
Christianity is not a teaching that has been tried and found wanting, it’s a teaching that has been tried, found difficult and abandoned.
From William Willimon:
We are busy building the foundation of our life brick by brick, cinder block by cinder block, one experience after another. Every lesson that we learn, every experience that we have, all of the good and bad that happen to us, becomes part of us.
From James Fisher:
If you were to take the sum total of all the authoritative articles ever written by the most qualified psychologists and psychiatrists on the subject of mental hygiene – if you were to combine them, and refine them, and cleave out the excess verbiage . . .if you were to have these unadulterated bits of pure scientific knowledge expressed by the most capable of living poets. You would have an awkward and incomplete summation of the Sermon on the Mount.”