Quotes from Edith Schaeffer

It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!

It makes sense that there is no sense without God.

We foolish mortals sometimes live through years not realizing how short life is, and that TODAY is your life.

The most precious thing a human being has to give is time. There is so very little of it, after all, in a life.

The thing about real life is that important events don't announce themselves... Usually something that is going to change your whole life is a memory before you can stop and be impressed about it.

People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it

People throw away what they could have by insisting on perfection, which they cannot have, and looking for it where they will never find it

There needs to be a homemaker exercising some measure of skill, imagination, creativity, desire to fulfill needs and give pleasure to others in the family. How precious a thing is the human family. It it not worth some sacrifice in time, energy, safety, discomfort, work? Does anything come forth without work?

A Christian, who realizes he has been made in the image of the Creator God and is therefore meant to be creative on a finite level, should certainly have more understanding of his responsibility to treat God's creation with sensitivity, and should develop his talents to do something to beautify his little spot on the earth's surface.

We foolish mortals sometimes live through years not realizing how short life is, and that TODAY is your life.

Human beings are very unbalanced and prone to go off on tangents. In every area of life- with too great emphasis on one thing, leaving out another important thing altogether. None of us will ever be perfectly balanced in our spiritual lives, our intellectual lives, our emotional lives, our family lives, in relationships with other human beings, or in our business lives. BUT WE ARE CHALLENGED TO TRY, WITH THE HELP OF GOD. We are meant to live in the scriptures.

If you have been afraid that your love of beautiful flowers and the flickering flame of the candle is somehow less spiritual than living in starkness and ugliness, remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation.

Food cannot take care of spiritual, psychological and emotional problems, but the feeling of being loved and cared for, the actual comfort of the beauty and flavour of food, the increase of blood sugar and physical well-being, help one to go on during the next hours better equipped to meet the problems (p. 124).

I am sure that there is no place in the world where your message would not be enhanced by your making the place (whether tiny or large, a hut or a palace) orderly, artistic and beautiful with some form of creativity, some form of 'art' (p. 213).

There is no occasion when meals should become totally unimportant. Meals can be very small indeed, very inexpensive, short times taken in the midst of a big push of work, but they should be always more than just food.

If you *stop* putting off homemaking until your hope of marriage develops into a reality, and *start* to develop an interesting home right now, it seems to me two things will happen: first, you will develop into the person you could be as you surround yourself with things that express your own tastes and ideas; and second, as you relax and become interested in areas of creativity, you will develop into a more interesting person to be with.

There are various art forms we may or may not have talent for, may or may not have time for, and we may or may not be able to express ourselves in, but we ought to consider this fact-that whether we choose to be an environment or not, we are . We produce an environment other people have to live in. We should be conscious of the fact that this environment which we produce by our very 'being' can affect the people who live with us or work with us.

For anyone who wants to write, and hopes some day to publish what he or she has written, it is far more important to write than it is to study about writing.

It is not a waste to write beautiful prose or poetry for one person's eyes alone!

I cannot understand the almost exclusive emphasis on racial integration, when in fact we are getting more and more segregated into tight little cliques on age grounds.

Is a Christian- one who communicates daily with the Creator- to divorce himself from the things God created and intended man to have, and which demonstrate the fact that man has been made in the image of God? In other words, are we who have been made in the image of our creator to be less creative than those who do not know the Creator? The Christian should have more vividly expressed creativity in his daily life.

You have started, whether you recognize that fact or not. We foolish mortals sometimes live through years of not realizing how short life is, and that TODAY is our life. The day comes when we die.

Remember that He who created you to be creative gave you the things with which to make beauty and gave you the sensitivity to appreciate and respond to His creation. Creativity is His gift to you and the 'raw materials' to be put together in various ways are His gift to you as well.

All art involves conscious discipline. If one is going to paint, do sculpture, design a building or write a book, it will involve discipline in time and energy- or there would never be any production at all to be seen, felt or enjoyed by ourselves or others... the balance of the use of time is a constant individual problem for all of us: what to do, what to leave undone. One is always having to neglect one thing in order to give precedence to something else. The question is one of priorities.