“It is the hour to rend thy chains, the blossom time of souls.”
Katharine Lee Bates, 1859-1929
“Backward, turn backward,
O Time, in your flight
make me a child again
just for to-night!”
Elizabeth Akers Allen, 1832-1911
American journalist and poet
“I look forward to growing old and wise and audacious.”
Glenda Jackson, b. 1936
British actress and politician
“Gee, I’m glad it’s raining
There’s always something to be thankful for.
I’m awfully glad it’s raining
Cause no one sees your tear drops when it pours.”
Jim Varney, 1949-2000
a.k.a. Ernest P. Worrell in “Ernest Goes to Camp”
Mount Le Conte, Great Smoky Mountains National Park
“The mountains are calling and I must go.”
John Muir, 1838-1914
One of first modern preservationists
& founder of the Sierra Club
“Be calm in arguing; for fierceness makes error a fault,
and truth discourtesy; calmness is a great advantage.”
George Herbert, 1593-1633
Welsh poet and priest
“Pay mind to your own life, your own health, and wholeness.
A bleeding heart is of no help to anyone if it bleeds to death.”
Frederick Buechner, 1926-
Presbyterian minister and American author
“It is the best joke there is, that we are here, and fools — that we are sown into time
like so much corn, that we are souls sprinkled at random like salt into time
and dissolved here, spread into matter, connected by cells right down to our feet,
and those feet likely to fell us over a tree root or jam us on a stone.
The joke part is that we forget it.
Give the mind two seconds alone and it thinks it’s Pythagoras.
We wake up a hundred times a day and laugh.”
Annie Dillard, 1945-
“Holy the Firm”
Pulitzer Prize winning American author
Bellflower
“When you cannot pray as you would, pray as you can.”
Edward Meyrick Goulburn, 1818-1897
Dean of Norwich
Highbush Blueberry
“Every branch that does bear fruit,
He prunes so that it will be even more fruitful.”
Father Tim, Mitford Series
“Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.”
(Bidden or unbidden, God is here.)
Carl Jung, 1875-1961
Swiss psychiatrist
Spiderwort
“I haven’t failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”
Thomas Edison, 1847-1931
American inventor and businessman
Sunflower
“I can no answer make but thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks.”
Shakespeare, 1564-1616
English poet and playwright
“He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep
to gain what he cannot lose.”
Jim Elliot, 1927-1956
Christian missionary to Ecuador who, along with four others,
was killed while attempting to reach the Huaorani people
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly
be wrung and possibly be broken…The only place outside of heaven where
you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
C. S. Lewis, 1898-1963
“The Four Loves”
Irish author and scholar
“Never confuse your perception of yourself
with the mystery that you really are accepted.”
Brennan Manning, Ragamuffin Gospel
author, priest, speaker
“The love we are longing for is a love that loves
not in spite of but in light of our weaknesses and failures.”
James Bryan Smith
“Rich Mullins: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven”
Bays Mountain, Kingsport, TN
“Do all the good you can
By all the means you can
In all the ways you can
In all the places you can
To all the people you can
As long as ever you can.”
John Wesley, 1703-1791
Anglican minister and Christian theologian
Sunflower at Aunt Willie’s Wildflowers
“Lord, grant that I may always desire more than I can accomplish.”
Michelangelo, 1475-1564
Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer
Tulip in Walled Garden, Biltmore Estate, NC
“Lord, help me find the next word,
And the next. And the next…”
Father Tim, Mitford series
by Jan Karon