Quotes About Dedication

I know I have no right to ask for exclusiveness beyond that point, but until then, I want to know that no other man is on your mind, in your heart or a part of your soul. When I make love to you, I want you to be mine in every way a woman can belong to a man.

Marriage can't be successful if the man doesn't love the woman more. The woman is the one who holds a marriage together, who works at it day after day, but she can't do it if the man is not fully, completely committed.

The Australian National Secretariat of Catholic Action, then little more than an idea in the making, needed a deputy for the director, Frank Maher. Santamaria's words—'so I said…"Yes", because I would have said yes to anything he asked'—echo down the years.7

They cannot understand that the figure of a laborer— some furrows in a plowed field, a bit of sand, sea and sky— are serious objects, so difficult but at the same time so beautiful, that it is indeed worth while to devote one's life to the task of expressing the poetry hidden in them.

But here is an important thing: you must practice not perfunctorily, but with all your intelligence and love,

That is why I hope you can keep up this continuity and sit for some time every day (if only for half hour, though two hours is better and five is remarkable and eight is bliss and transfiguration!) before your typewriter,- if not writing the just thoughtfully pulling your hair. (...) It takes an hour or two of vacant moodling, when nothing at all comes out on paper; and this is difficult always because it makes us (...) with our accomplishment-mania, feel uneasy and guilty.

I want to assure you with all earnestness that no writing is a waste of time—no creative work where the feelings, the imagination, the intelligence must work.

Inspirations never go in for long engagements; they demand immediate marriage to action.

The top experts in the world are ardent students. The day you stop learning, you're definitely not an expert.

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds of failure, battered by their own unruly emotions, and bruised by rejection and ridicule, authentic disciples may have stumbled and frequently fallen, endured lapses and relapses, gotten handcuffed to the fleshpots and wandered into a far county. Yet, they kept coming back to Jesus.

According to Viktor Frankl, a person finds identity only to the extent that "he commits himself to something beyond himself, to a cause greater than himself."4 The meaning of our lives emerges in the surrender of ourselves to an adventure of becoming who we are not yet.

As Emile Leger said when he left his mansion in Montreal to go live in a leper colony in Africa, "The time for talking is over.

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness.

What makes authentic disciples is not visions, ecstasies, biblical mastery of chapter and verse, or spectacular success in the ministry, but a capacity for faithfulness. Buffeted by the fickle winds of failure, battered by their own unruly emotions, and bruised by rejection and ridicule, authentic disciples may have stumbled and frequently fallen, endured lapses and relapses, gotten handcuffed to the fleshpots, and wandered into a far country. Yet they kept coming back to Jesus.

Keep practicing until it lives inside you; then it will seem foolishly easy to the unpracticed. — BILL HOLM, "FRIED CHICKEN IN ICELAND

the Church is a purely volunteer organization. No member has to do anything he or she doesn't choose to do.

So I had him go to work, because it occurred to me that even when your wife leaves you, you still have to show up for work.

We can do anything we want as long as we stick to it long enough.

Many people have the wrong idea of what constitutes true happiness. It is not attained through self-gratification, but through fidelity to a worthy purpose.

I knew I must write a novel. But it seemed an impossible thing to do when I had been trying with great difficulty to write paragraphs that would be the distillation of what made a novel. It was necessary to write longer stories now as you would train for a longer race.

When George Plimpton asked Ernest Hemingway what the best training for an aspiring writer would be in a 1954 interview, Hem replied, "Let's say that he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with.

Martyrs are the best possible advertisements for an unpopular cause.

If a policeman is serious about his profession but says he has time, he lies.

I will baptise her, he said. You have walked a long way for something you believe in. In our day that is rare. People seldom walk long distances for their faith. That's why the world looks the way it does.