Quotes About Renewal

Not only are selves conditional but they die. Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stiff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they have always been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

We desperately need pardon. We need to have the past erased. We need, somehow, to have sin dealt with so that it no longer controls us and makes the present the slave of the past.

Once in seven years I burn all my sermons; for it is a shame if I cannot write better sermons now than I did seven years ago.

By salvation I mean not barely according to the vulgar notion deliverance from hell or going to heaven but a present deliverance from sin a restoration of the soul to its primitive health its original purity a recovery of the divine nature the renewal of our souls after the image of God in righteousness and true holiness in justice mercy and truth.

all starts with renewing the mind, and you can't do that if you are abusing drugs and alcohol. We need to be present with the Holy Spirit.

He felt a renewal of the old passion for study and learning; and with the curious and disembodied vigor of the scholar that is the condition of neither youth nor age, he returned to the only life that had not betrayed him. He discovered that he had not gone far from that life even in his despair.

he thought of the years before, the distant years with his parents on the farm, and of the deadness from which he had been miraculously revived.

When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.

The Upper One sent the Tribulation to destroy them and remind them that existence means constant change.

It's queer,' I said 'the ways things go on, I mean. Like a seed - it looks all shriveled and finished, you'd think it was dead, but it isn't. And now a new life is starting, coming into all this . . .' Josella put her face in her hands. 'Oh God! Does it have to go on being like this? On - and on - and on - ?

People open bookstores because they want their souls back. (from "Two Women" published in Do Me: Tales of Sex & Love from Tin House)

Success is a great deodorant. It takes away all your past smells.

I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow.

He had the effect on her of a window being thrown open and fresh air and sunlight being let in

Fight with realistic hope, not to destroy all the world's wrong, but to renew its good.

And you know, it was like I was breathing my own self back into me to say these word,s to remember that these things existed--the green trees of the eastern woodland at home in North America, their strong and supple branches, sunlight through the trees.

It's not over yet. A dream can spend all night fighting off the morning. Let me start again. —Elizabeth Willis, from "Ephemeral Stream." Poem-A-Day January 2, 2014

I was looking in the window of a newer Canaan, but the dew on its lilies tasted like salt.

My imagination, my ability to understand the way love and people grow over time, how passion can surprise and renew, utterly failed me.

Don't hold onto things, it will only bring you pain.

Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of the earth. HENRY DAVID THOREAU

The heart must be renewed by divine grace, or it will be in vain to seek for purity of life. He who attempts to build up a noble, virtuous character independent of the grace of Christ is building his house upon the shifting sand.

The Christian's life is not a modification or improvement of the old, but a transformation of nature.