Quotes from Richard J Foster

Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial

True service is a lifestyle. It acts from the ingrained patterns of living. It springs spontaneously to meet human need.

Spiritual disciplines can do nothing. They can only get us to the place where something can be done.

To listen to others quiets and disciplines the mind to listen to God.

Meditation sends us into our ordinary world with greater perspective and balance.

The truly Christian imagination never lets Jesus Christ out of her sight.

Thomas Merton writes that if we have meditated on the events of the Passion but have not meditated on Dachau and Auschwitz, our perception of God at work in present times is incomplete.

To conform to a sick society is to become sick.

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.

Restriction often enhances clarity.

Worship may produce an outward change, but our inner condition will eventually be revealed

Confession is a difficult discipline for us, because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin.

Freedom from anxiety is characterized by three inner attitudes. If what we have we received as a gift, and if what we have is to be cared for by God, and if what we have is available to others, then we will possess freedom from anxiety.

Spiritual disciplines answer the shallow world.

I determined to learn to pray so that my experience conforms to the words of Jesus rather than try to make his words conform to my impoverished experience.

The imagination, like all our faculties, has participated in the fall.