Quotes About Renewal

Memory can glean, but can never renew. It brings us joys faint as is the perfume of the flowers, faded and dried, of the summer that is gone.

If one could wallow amid filth for half a life and then wash himself clean in a day, then sin would be no worse than dirt on the hands which water can cleanse in a minute. Repentance may begin instantly, but reformation often requires a sphere of years.

There are many Christians who like, about once in twelve months, to have a good revival in their hearts. They think that, like the year, they can make up for freezing and snowing all winter by a period of intense heat in the summer. The remedy for such is not to chill the revivals, but to shorten the intervals between them, and to endeavor to make their life equatorial and tropical all the year round.

That is the best baptism that leaves the man cleanest inside.

There cannot be such a thing as true life without praise. Praising and no longer praising are related to each other as are living and no longer living." —Claus Westermann, The Praise of God in the Psalms (1965)

Poet W.S. Merwin once mused that in order to adequately describe the forests of eastern Pennsylvania where he grew up, he'd "have to speak in a forgotten language." He was aware that a shift in consciousness is necessary for certain forms of communication and that it's easy to lose ancient languages we've long ceased to practice. How, then, do we speak of the languages that we may need in renewing the Great Conversation?

You know that life is a cycle, don't you, my sweetheart?' she said. 'All things are born, and all things die. Other people are afraid of that, but you must never be. If you accept it, life will always be beautiful for you, even when it is sorrowful.

the real strength comes from learning how to trust again.

Keeping this picture on my desk reminds me that nothing is ever too far gone to be treated right.

I find forgiveness to be really healthy.

This is perhaps a more useful way to think about the shape of time—not as a line or an arrow or a circle or a spiral, but something living, a circle that expands out of sight, invisible roots that grow and grow even as the parts we can see die off. "The world is always new," wrote Ursula K. Le Guin, "however old its roots.

Maybe true travel is not the transportation of the body, but a change of perception, renewing the mind.

But to hear Mozart in a bombed city: how much more beautiful it sounds, as if it were composed to somehow soothe the ruins, to promise a wiser future rising from the rubble.

we need a new miracle of being human. we need a new miracle of being alive.

Dad had crossed the desert of his exhaustion, had found new springs and oases of energies.

at the request of Jean-Claude Trichet, I called a videoconference of the FOMC to discuss renewing

Let's make one perfect day. And if it feels right, let's make another one tomorrow.

I'm not interested in trying to re-create what once was. That doesn't interest me. It's boring.

Tengo la esperanza de que algún día me despojaré de este cuerpo como una caparazón inútil, acaso a la espera de una nueva caparazón" Cuentos Completos II

Something begins, begins; Starlit and sunlit, something walks abroad In flesh and spirit and fire. Something is loosed to change the shaken world.

The Italian proletariat needs a blood bath for its force to be renewed.

Nessun fenomeno al mondo può impedire al sole di risorgere.

A canter is a cure for every evil.

Le lingue straniere ringiovaniscono i pensieri.