Quotes About Presence

When you cultivate a godly thought life your soul will shine and you will exhibit the presence of the Lord in you.

The impression of strength came from an extraordinary vitality that seemed to pulse in the very air around him

His hostess was one of those women who even in an overcrowded room can create a sense of spaciousness.

She assured herself that the practice of the presence of God, that she had learned with self-discipline of thought and will, was not a selfish thing but something absolutely essential if one's soul was to be of the slightest use.

Home! It showed you its face when you sat quiet within it at that moment when day was passing to night, but it could only reveal its spirit, its eternal meaning, when you stood at a little distance, just turning to leave it or just returning to it, seeing it at that transition moment when a larger world was claiming or releasing you.

I was thinking of moments of respite. One can't get the most out of them unless one treats them as one treats the next thing; as though it were the only thing. I mean, if you think about the toothache that has just stopped, it so easily becomes the toothache that is going to begin again, and all your peace is lost.

While you are living, part of you has slipped away to the cemetery.

I arrive home with pink flushed cheeks and glittering green-blue eyes. The hardest part is the his smell that lingers on my skin. He is here and yet he isn't here at all. It is only a trick of the mind; a terrible delusion that leaves me with pale, white arms grasping out into the shallow blunt, blackness for someone who is far away. Someone who leaves you feeling utterly and beautifully broken.

What ensued will go down in the record of my heart as one of those rare times in life when you finally rest—when you put down the burden of striving and a sense of well-being spreads like honey into every corner of your consciousness. There was nowhere else to go, nothing to do, no one to be—just now, just this precious day, these shared breaths with a friend.

the God that the Sufi poet Hafiz writes about: Not the God of names, Nor the God of don'ts, Nor the God who ever does Anything weird, But the God who only knows four words And keeps repeating them, saying: "Come dance with Me.

In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.

She loved being alive and in the world; being alive and in the world with her was like dancing with someone who really knew how to lead.

Sometimes in Texas as I walked, I would suddenly feel the presence of all the hidden guns around me, as though I were an x-ray machine. Here in London, I knew that not a single civilian—or police officer, for that matter—was armed.

The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They're listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn't; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle. Maybe they don't want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?

God dwells in your heart, it means you are safe and that He will never, ever leave you. He becomes your dwelling place??a place of shelter and caring and protection.

I have found heaven on earth, since heaven is God, and God is in my soul.

You can plan all you want, but you will never know what will be. Life just is, and I am here in it. I am waiting for what comes next.

Greeks were so much a part of the Roman world that, in the surviving texts, they are often more visible by the shadow they cast than by their actual written presence.

I know now there should have been no higher beatitude than to live in the presence of an unselfish, unasking, vital love.

Whenever I don't know what to do, I watch what I am doing.

But what Tyler longed for was to have The Feeling arrive; when every flicker of light that touched the dipping branches of a weeping willow, every breath of breeze that bent the grass towards the row of apple trees, every shower of yellow ginko leaves dropping to the ground with such direct and tender sweetness, would fill the minister with profound and irreducible knowledge that God was right there.

To listen to a person is not passive. To really listen is active, and Dottie had really listened.

The next morning he and Denise worked in an intimate silence. If she was up at the cash register and he was behind his counter, he could still feel the invisible presence of her against him, as though she had become Slippers, or he had—their inner selves brushing up against the other.