Words to Live By...

This is a HORRID pic of Kant...  

The moral philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote some pretty cool stuff I debated in my moral philosophy class a few years ago... though we couldn't rest with surety on everything he said, I did come away with a pretty good idea of his categorical imperative... 

A categorical imperative is basically a mantra which you should live by morally IF and ONLY IF it could be followed in EVERY circumstance. 

Philosophers LOVE to think about every possible circumstance, and they like breaking the rules of physics to do so... 

On a slight tangent, my favorite question, which hasn't been answered, was posed by both Mel Gibson, and  my philosophy of religion teacher... Why is BLOOD the vehicle by which God forgives sins? He could have chosen ANYTHING, and He chose BlOOD... 

Anyway, I am a word collector in many ways... whether it's old words that should come back into play, or what I consider words to live by, whether or not they may classify as a categorical imperative, here are some people and sayings that get me going in a good way. 

Much nicer... he has kind eyes... or he's checking you out ;)

• "I am most myself when I am loving others." - Pastor Greg Hill 
• "The universe is so vast and so ageless that the life of one man can only be justified by the measure of his sacrifice." 
• "Your spiritual life is never just for you...but for the healing of the nations...that we might be part of God's world." - Archie Coates (Pastor at HTB)
• "The opposite of love isn't hatred, it's the using of another as a means to an end." --Christopher West 
• "It is amazing how complete is the delusion that beauty is goodness." - Leo Tolstoy
• "Step back and decide how important your opinions are verses the people you claim to love." ~ Bill Johnson
• "Don't be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value." ~ Arthur Miller
• ‘You can calculate the worth of a man by the number of his enemies, and the importance of a work of art by the amount that it is attacked.’--Gustave Flaubert
• "Christians need to have soft hearts and hard feet" ~ Jackie Pullinger
• "Safety isn't found in the absence of danger, but in the presence of God" - Simon Guillebaud
• "The language of Friendship is not words but meanings. It is an intelligence above language." - Henry David Thoreau
• "Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go." - T.S. Elliot
• "Leadership: The art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
• "Anything less than this complete trust...would not be love, anything less than pure trust would be a kind of careful negotiation. A careful negotiation isn't love. A person must be willing to be dashed on the rocks or made the fool in exchange for a relationship in order for pure love to take place." Donald Miller "Searching for God Knows What" 
• "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." ~ from "Ulysses," A.L. Tennyson 
• "What do we live for if not to make life less difficult for each other?" ~ George Eliot
• The meek man is not a human mouse afflicted with a sense of his own inferiority. He has accepted God's estimate of his own life: In himself, nothing; In God, everything. He knows well that the world will never see him as God sees him and he has stopped caring.-- A.W. Tozer
• "Courage does not always roar. Sometimes it is the quiet voice at the end of the day that simply says 'I will try again tomorrow.'" ~ Pope Benedict XVI
• "It is not our abilities that show who we truly are. It is our choices." - Albus Dumbledore
• "Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born.”-- Anais Nin
• "If you believe that no one was ever corrupted by a book, you also have to believe that no one was ever improved by a book (or a play or a movie). You have to believe ... that all art is morally trivial and that all education is morally irrelevant." ~ Irving Kristol
• "The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

These amazing words, full of courage, stamina, grace and truth... these words were set into contexts which I've forgotten. And context, I think adds power and meaning to these words, not the other way around. The Jackie Pullinger quote, for example, comes from over 40 years of missionary work in Hong Kong's tough heroine/prostitution rings... talk about hard feet living there! Somehow working in East London doesn't seem so bad. 

I've been in a season of reading lately. My life seems to come in seasons... never finding the balance, something always takes the majority of my attention, whether it's writing, reading, dancing, working, meeting with friends, praying, etc... right now it's reading. (soon I'll be editing, I promise). There are so many books that I want to read, books I want to re-read, books I think I should have read when I was a child... lifetimes of books! Sometimes it's maddeningly depressing, other times, I stare at the wonder of my goodreads to-read list, or my amazon wishlist, and just think it's a miracle that so many awesome sounding books have been published. 

It gives me hope and utter despair. 

Sorry for the tangent... 

But getting back to context, these words, from other worlds and societies and contexts... they speak to my context... they meet me here and breathe life into me here. 

And I think to myself, I hope anything that I write or say does the same to others... 

Hope. Despair. Caught in an unbearable tension... So I hope they do you some good.