Quotes About Presence

When you love someone that much and that person is away from you, sometimes it literally feels like you can't breathe, as if your body is aching for air. And then that person walks into the room, and all that ache inside of you, all that longing, dissolves and you feel yourself breathe again. But it's as if he takes the same breath with you. You're both one.

when the great moments came, you should stop and enjoy them, because they weren't going to last.

Once upon a time, there was a Zen sign at every small railway crossing in America Stop. Look. And listen.

One Japanese translation of Psalm 22:3 reads, "When God's people praise Him, He brings a big chair and sits there.

Absolute silence might well be, in some instances, our greatest act of worship. Tozer referred to our experiencing a "breathless silence" when we know God is near. Not all worship is expressed in words or actions. Indeed, the closer one comes to a true encounter with God, the less appropriate some words or actions become.

Mankind have banned the Divinity from their presence; they have relegated him to a sanctuary; the walls of the temple restrict his view; he does not exist outside of it.

In the presence of a psychiatrist I can only be a sick man; in the presence of a Christian brother I can dare to be a sinner.

But I'm afraid I'm bad at comforting; I can listen all right, but I can hardly ever find anything to say.

God is not a matter of mood. He is still present even when we are not in the mood to meet with him. .

it is God himself, the Lord and Creator of all things, who is so small here, who is hidden here in the corner, who enters into the plainness of the world, who meets us in the helplessness and defenselessness of a child, and wants to be with us.

The more I begin to love the commandments of God in creation and word, the more present they will be for me in every hour.

I think that even in this place we ought to live as if we had no wishes and no future, and just be our true selves.

The first moments of the new day are not the time for our own plans and worries, not even for our zeal to accomplish our own work, but for God's liberating grace, God's sanctifying presence.

We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved.

Jesus is Lord of the ages and is always with his own, even when things are difficult, and will abide with us; that is our comfort. If tribulation and anxiety come upon us, Jesus is with us and leads us over into God's eternal kingdom.

The believer need not feel any shame when yearning for the physical presence of other Christians, as if one were still living too much in the flesh. A human being is created as a body; the Son of God appeared on earth in the body for our sake and was raised in the body.

At the same time, however, for antiquity the holiest sign of the presence of God, the cross, is the symbol of utter disgrace and remoteness from God. Antiquity becomes our historical heritage in this twofold relationship to Christ, in its nearness and its opposition to Christ.

Just as Christians should not be constantly feeling the pulse of their spiritual life, so too the Christian community has not been given to us by God for us to be continually taking its temperature.

The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15.34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which he is with us and helps us.

Insight, knowledge, truth without love is nothing—it is not even truth, for truth is God, and God is love. So truth without love is a lie; it is nothing. "Speaking the truth in love," says Paul in another letter [Eph. 4:15]. Truth just for oneself, truth spoken in enmity and hate is not truth but a lie, for truth brings us into God's presence, and God is love. Truth is either the clarity of love, or it is nothing.

We say that religion is a matter of mood: we must wait until the mood strikes us. And then we often wait for years —perhaps until the end of our life—until we are once again in the mood to be religious. This idea is based on a great illusion. It is alll well and good to let religion be a matter of mood, but God is not a matter of mood. He is still present even when we are not in the mood to meet with him.

You can't do opera when already from the 10th row you can only see little dolls on the stage. In such an enormous space you can't put much faith in the personal presence of the individual singer, which is reflected in facial expressions, among other things.

The Lord watches over us every moment of every day. He is there--and He cares--about every step and every breath.

Ghosts are common to the life of any child:mine just happened to come to dinner more often than most