Quotes About Engagement

We learn the inner secret of happiness when we learn to direct our inner drives, our interest and our attention to something outside ourselves.

A frequent exchange of text messages is not a relationship. It's not even a pen-pal.

Indeed, what says more: the few lines of a tightly written poem or a volume of analytical comments on it? The communicative ability of artifacts depends on how the work of negotiating meaning is distributed between reification and participation.

Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it's an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.

My main disappointment was always that a book had to end. And then what? But I don't think I was ever disappointed by the books. I must have been what any author would consider an ideal reader. I felt every pain and pleasure suffered or enjoyed by all the characters. Oh, but I identified!

Rather, our eyes have become lazy, our attention spans atrophied. Our self-preoccupation had reduced us to tunnel vision.

There is nothing more common than for people who want to talk about God to lose interest in the people they are talking to.

the primary practice of language is not in giving out information but being in relationship.

Having and defending and celebrating the Bible instead of receiving, submitting to, and praying the Bible, masks an enormous amount of nonreading.

Somehow, though he moves right in front of me, I don't see him; quietly but surely he's active, and I miss it.

Parables release the adrenaline of urgency into our bloodstream.

Story is the most natural way of enlarging and deepening our sense of reality, and then enlisting us as participants in it. Stories open doors to areas or aspects of life that we didn't know were there, or had quit noticing out of over-familiarity, or supposed were out-of-bounds to us. They then welcome us in. Stories are verbal acts of hospitality.

It is not easy to convey a sense of wonder, let alone resurrection wonder, to another. It's the very nature of wonder to catch us off guard, to circumvent expectations and assumptions. Wonder can't be packaged, and it can't be worked up. It requires some sense of being there and some sense of engagement.

To be human is nothing less than to be caught in the great congested pilgrimage of existence and to join ourselves freely to it in the face of the evidence of its never-ending troubles.

Speaking to people does not have the same personal intensity as listening to them. The question I put to myself is not 'How many people have you spoken to about Christ this week?' but 'How many people have you listened to in Christ this week?

A poem is something that happens between people, O'Hara insisted in his manifesto for Personism

Cowards do not count in battle they are there, but not in it.

You will be educated, which means that you will be interested where others are bored, that you will notice unities where others experience randomness, and that you will intend meanings where others are just spouting words. For exactly that is supposed to be the result of becoming literate: The world becomes a thick texture of significance that you know how to "access."--Eva Brann

It is a maxim of learning: To learn anything requires letting it be, but not letting it alone. Is there a way, a mode of engagement, of not letting things or people alone that yet lets them be—not tolerably, not as bearable, but really be?

Respect is better than tolerance (2) for the very obverse and complement of its sternness: It does not just "bear" the others, nor just forbear to judge them. It takes them seriously, for respect is engaged regard, even appreciative receptivity. Tolerance permits, even finds, convenient slanting glances, averted eyes; respect looks the others full in the face, hears their words.

an engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world

Observing what is around us and registering errant impressions is a state not so much of passive inaction as of alert receptivity. Allowing ourselves to notice, to be open to our surroundings, is a way of awakening our curiosity in the world outside ourselves. The

True engagement – the ability to give ourselves deliberately and unreservedly to a task or a personal interaction – arises from a clear sense of our own desires, goals and intentions. It is when our energies and our perspective are replenished that we can return to our active lives with a renewed sense of pleasure and commitment. In other words, it is only if we periodically disengage, that we can become truly and effectively engaged.

If we rush ceaselessly through disconnected activities without checking in on our moods or motives, we can lose track of ourselves; in a sense, we lose the ability to experience our experiences. A