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Quotes About Presence

The practice of the presence of God, though we begin it at special times of prayer, is designed to spill out and over and into all times.
~ Peter Kreeft
He came. That is the salient fact, the towering truth, that alone keeps us from putting a bullet through our heads. He came.
~ Peter Kreeft
Christ deliberately hides Himself, disguises Himself, gives no physical sign of His Real Presence in the Eucharist, for a crucially important purpose: to test and elicit and strengthen our faith. If we saw miraculous signs in every Eucharist, or if the Eucharistic bread and wine had no taste, like other bread and wine, or even if we felt unique feelings each time we received the Eucharist, our faith would be less strong because it would have sensible or emotional crutches to lean on.
~ Peter Kreeft
Since (1) charity is supernatural, and comes only from the real presence of God in the soul (St. Thomas' paragraph 3), and since (2) all men, and not only Christians, are capable of charity (as has been proved in the paragraph above), it follows that (3) all men are capable of accepting the real presence of God in their souls, even if they have defective or mistaken concepts of God.
~ Peter Kreeft
St. Thomas mentions the three things necessary to attain any end, earthly or Heavenly: knowledge, love, and presence;
~ Peter Kreeft
sacramentally present at Mass—this Church is either God 's own or it is the devil's own.
~ Peter Kreeft
That divine presence explains the joy the Jews felt so passionately when they went to their temple and which we find expressed in their Psalms. If we don't have as much joy in our churches as they had, it can only be because we don't have as much faith and love toward that divine presence as they had. And yet we have the presence of the same God in an even more complete and more concrete form in Christ, who is God incarnate, fully divine and fully human.
~ Peter Kreeft
Love works; and if we do not see the works of love (in places where they obviously ought to be) then we can be sure that love is not present.
~ Peter Kreeft
The Triune God is in the world, nearer to us than we are to ourselves, yet the world is also encompassed by his loving presence. He does have the whole world in his hands, even while he inhabits the whole world. For Christians, being saved means being caught up into this communion, indwelled by God and indwelling in him, and being opened up so that other people have room in us and we in them.
~ Peter Leithart
The artistry of dialogue lies in experiencing the flow of meaning and seeing the one thing that needs to be said now. Like the Quakers, who enjoin members to say not simply whatever pops into their heads but only those thoughts that are compelling (and which cause the speaker to quake from the need to speak them)
~ Peter M. Senge
In his first summers, forsaking all his toys, my son would stand rapt for nearly an hour in his sandbox in the orchard, as doves and redwings came and went on the warm wind, the leaves dancing, the clouds flying…the child was not observing; he was at rest in the very center of the universe, a part of things, unaware of endings and beginning, still in unison with the primordial nature of creation, letting all light and phenomena pour through.
~ Peter Matthiessen
I nod to Death in passing, aware of the sound of my own feet upon my path. The
~ Peter Matthiessen
You truly see by not trying to see.
~ Peter Matthiessen
All animals and wayfarers are Tukten's friends, and listen to him carefully, yet he rarely speaks except when spoken to, and never seems to speak too much; without obtruding, he becomes the centre of each situation, so naturally does he belong where the moment finds him.
~ Peter Matthiessen
Moment by moment, breath by breath...that is my greatest teaching.
~ Peter Matthiessen
only to be wholly present in this moment, moment after moment
~ Peter Matthiessen
In the boulder at my back, there is a shudder, so slight that at another time it might have gone unnoticed. The tremor comes again; the earth is nudging me. And still I do not see.
~ Peter Matthiessen
There were far too many at my birthday party, and I wouldn't have invited any of them. I couldn't see them at first, because it takes a few days for the eyes to open, but they made their presence felt. Try having breakfast with a football team, all of them fighting to get hold of the same piece of toast, and you'll know what I went through.
~ Peter Mayle
Is better to get an instant life, Instead of just there for life
~ Unknown
A story: lurks. A story, a good story, is just out of reach, always. Wake up in an unfamiliar darkness, in a room you don't seem to recognize. Flip on the light. Nothing there. It's your room again. But didn't you feel a presence in the dark? The presence of someone you once knew? Someone you once loved?
~ Peter Orner
You guys, you people, you all run on one big engine, all the same for everybody, the whole world over. Know the name of that engine? Love? she speculated. Good try, but completely wrong, sorry. The name of the engine is story...If you want to get fancy, we could use the word narrative...And what does narrative need? The presence of evil, that's what. Doity Toid and the Eel
~ Unknown
Michael needed to shift his perspective on leadership. "It's all about being present and taking responsibility for how you relate to yourself and others," says George. "And that means being willing to adjust so that you can meet people where they are. Instead of expecting them to be somewhere else and getting angry and trying to will them to that place, you try to meet them where they are and lead them where you want them to go.
~ Phil Jackson
Por eso soy partidario de la filosofía del difunto Satchel Paige, que afirmaba: «A veces me siento y pienso y otras, simplemente, me siento».
~ Phil Jackson
To be successful at basketball, as author John McPhee once pointed out, you need to have a finely tuned sense of where you are and what's happening around you at any given moment.
~ Phil Jackson