From Miraslov Volf, Married Love," The Christian Century, (June 5, 2002):
But an enduring marriage requires more than contractual reciprocity. Contracts are conditional, conditioned on mutual performance; contracts are temporary, terminable when they no longer suit you as long as you pay the damages; contracts are intended to advance one’s interests and reevaluated whenever they don’t.”
From Yogi Bera:
If you don’t go to your friends funerals, they won’t come to yours
From Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (Library of America, February 9, 2004) vol. 1, at page 382
It seems to me that I can see the entire destiny of America contained in the first Puritan who stepped ashore.
From Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (Harper Perennial, September 5, 2000) at 8-9:
This awareness of himself as a separate entity…that he will die before those whom he loevs, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness…all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison…The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness
From Martin Luther, Of Vocation and Calling:
It is much to be lamented, that no man is content and satisfied with that which God gives him in his vocation and calling. Other men’s conditions please us more than our own. The more we have the more we want. To serve God is for every one to remain in his vocation and calling, be it ever so mean and simple.
From Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, Book V (August 30, 1994)
But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble, that is, the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?
From Mary Pipher, Ph.D., The Shelter of Each Other - Rebuilding Our Families (1996) at pages 269 - 270:
Rangers Rescue Lincoln Couple”: While their three children watched from the bank, the parents were rescued from the lip of a 75-foot waterfall in the Roaring River in Rocky Mountain National Park. They suffered hypothermia from spending 40 minutes in the cold rushing waters of the river, but were in stable condition at a Denver hospital.
The husband cradled his wife in his arms and bore the brunt of the pounding water. After the couple had been in the water for about forty minutes, the husband could barely hold onto the boulders, but the wife talked calmly to him and helped him stay conscious. At last, a ranger in a wet suit, roped to rangers on the shore, moved into the water toward the couple. Another ranger got in the water below the waterfall, ready to catch them if they went over.///The exhausted couple made a plunge toward the ranger, who was able to hang on to them long enough for other rangers to pull them to shore. They were given warm fluids by the rangers to counter the effects of hypothermia. Two helicopters then flew the couple to a hospital in Denver.///During the time their parents were in the water the children watched from the shore. After the rescue, rangers took them to their camp and packed up the family’s gear. The rangers told the children, “Your dad was a hero. He saved your mom.” …offers this story as a metaphor for Family Life in our Times. First, because biological families, formed families, family communities are cornerstones of human growth and flourish. “Protecting one another, nuturing one another is what families do – and for all their imperfections, it’s what families do best. “Whether it is sensible or not, families will try to save each other.” [270]Often right now the waters surrounding families are cold and perilous. To survive, members must stick together, take risks and make sacrifices for each other. Partners must cradle each other from our modern elements.
From a Spanish Saying:
An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.