Quotes About Presence

Visualizing God's presence not only bestows comfort, but it restrains sinful tendencies.

The reality of God's presence both comforts our hearts and restrains our behavior.

These things I have spoken to you while being present with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in My name, He will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all things that I said to you" (John 14:25–26).

every night I fold myself into her, every night she comes into my life and I feel her hand on my heart and she is saying, I am here ... I am here.

I studied her face, and for the moment just did that and let all the questions just slide away, like something dropped into the mist and water below us to slide away in the oily silence of the current. — Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men (Harcourt, Brace, & Co., 1946)

I hope later she will see and feel a thing about these parries I have given up talking to others about; a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent. She seems so depressed sometimes by the monotony and boredom of her city life, I thought maybe this endless grass and wind she would see a thing that sometimes comes when monotony and boredom are accepted.

When will the others come? And there is one who will never come. At least we will not see him if he does. But, oh, when I think he will be there--when our Canadian soldiers return there will be a shadow army with them--the army of the fallen. We will not *see* them--but they will be there!

She surrendered herself utterly to the charm of the moment.

She felt as if love was all about her and around her, breathed out from some great, invisible, hovering Tenderness. One couldn't be afraid or bitter where love was - and love was everywhere.

She felt as if love was all about her and around her, breathed out from some great, invisible, hovering Tenderness.

Thereupon Anne held her tongue so obediently and thoroughly that her continued silence made Marilla rather nervous, as if in the presence of something not exactly natural.

Cathedrals became houses of light, not of God, monuments to man's architectural inspiration, where humanity worshiped its own ingenuity and not God's presence.

THERE ARE ANGELS on this earth and they come in subtle forms

Show business imposes its own strict temporality: no matter how many CDs or DVDs we own, it would still have been better to have been there, to have seen the living performers in the richness of their being and to have participated, however briefly, in the glory of their performance.

The cultivation of mindfulness is ultimately a matter of life and death, not in a scary way, but in the sense that we are always at risk, in every moment, for missing what is deepest and richest in our lives, the texture of the tapestry itself. We might say (every pun intended) that the richness lies right beneath our noses in any and every moment.

The way to get from point A to point B is really to be at A.

You may also notice the stillness of the pause between breaths.

Try to be mindful, and let things take their natural course. Then your mind will become still in any surroundings, like a clear forest pool. All kinds of wonderful, rare animals will come to drink at the pool, and you will clearly see the nature of all things. You will see many strange and wonderful things come and go, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha. —Ajahn Chah

Mindfulness is often likened to a mirror; it simply reflects what is there. It is not a process of thinking; it is preconceptual, before thought. One can be mindful of thought. There is all the difference in the world between thinking and knowing that thought is happening, as thoughts chase each other through the mind and the process is mirrored back to us.

Just listen. Just be. Just witness. Just care. You don't have to fix it.

As she reads, I listen to her

The moment where everything becomes unstuck: the world around you suddenly moving both slower and quicker, until you are completely and totally present in it. Your everything.

The part where someone looks at you, really looks at you, when you walk into a room. You either have that with someone or you don't.

That's why it's important to keep your distance from people who have frigid breath. Just their presence can put out the most intense fire, with results we're familiar with. If we stay a good distance away from those people, it's easier to protect ourselves from being extinguished.