All posts by SandyM

Various Quotes

Friendship

All the below is from :http://home.att.net/~quotations/friendship.html

A friend is one who walks in when others walk out
–Walter Winchell
“Don’t walk in front of me, I may not follow. Don’t walk behind me, I may not lead. Walk beside me and be my friend. ”
–Albert Camus
Your friend is the man who knows all about you, and still likes you.
–Elbert Hubard
I get by with a little help from my friends.
–John Lennon
“True friendship is like sound health; the value of it is seldom known until it be lost. ”
–Charles Caleb Colton
“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
My friends are my estate.
–Emily Dickinson
“Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. ”
–Bible: Ecclesiastes
“Two may talk together under the same roof for many years, yet never really meet; and two others at first speech are old friends. ”
–Mary Catherwood
“Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather is one of those things that give value to survival. ”
–C. S. Lewis
“I might give my life for my friend, but he had better not ask me to do up a parcel. ”
–Logan Pearsall Smith
The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.
–Abraham Lincoln, (sent by Heather Myers)
“The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him, his own. ”
–Benjamin Disraeli
“Though our communication wanes at times of absence, I’m aware of a strength that emanates in the background. ”
–Claudette Renner
“I can trust my friends. These people force me to examine, encourage me to grow. ”
–Cher
“Treat people as if they were what they ought to be and you help them to become what they are capable of being. ”
–Goethe
Friendship is one mind in two bodies.
–Mencius
True friendship is never serene.
–Mariede Svign
It’s the friends you can call up at 4am that matter.
–Marlene Dietrick
A friend is a gift you give yourself.
–Robert Louis Stevenson
“Anybody can sympathise with the sufferings of a friend, but it requires a very fine nature to sympathise with a friend’s success. ”
–Oscar Wilde
If you judge people, you have no time to love them.
–Mother Teresa
I will speak ill of no man, and speak all the good I know of everybody.
–Benjamin Franklin
Misfortune shows those who are not really friends.
–Aristotle
“Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with. ”
–Mark Twain
“Thus nature has no love for solitude, and always leans, as it were, on some support; and the sweetest support is found in the most intimate friendship. ”
–Cicero
“Advice is like snow; the softer it falls, the longer it dwells upon, and the deeper it sinks into the mind. ”
–Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The best mirror is an old friend.
–George Herbert
What is a friend? A single soul in two bodies.
–Aristotle
The friendship that can cease has never been real.
–Saint Jerome
“I count myselt in nothing else so happy As in a soul rememb’ring my good friends. ”
–William Shakespeare
“I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man’s milk and restorative cordial. ”
–Thomas Jefferson
“Sir, more than kisses, letters, mingle souls; For, thus friends absent speak. ”
–John Donne
“Too late we learn, a man must hold his friend Unjudged, accepted, trusted to the end. ”
–John Boyle O’Reilly
Friends have all things in common.
–Plato
Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.
–Artistotle
My best friend is the one who brings out the best in me.
–Henry Ford
“No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. ”
–George Eliot
“It is a sweet thing, friendship, a dear balm, A happy and auspicious bird of calm… ”
–Shelly
The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.
–Wilson Mizner
“The happiest moments my heart knows are those in which it is pouring forth its affections to a few esteemed characters. ”
–Thomas Jefferson
There is no hope of joy except in human relations.
–Exupery
“The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man’s success in life. ”
–Edward Everett Hale
“Except in cases of necessity, which are rare, leave your friend to learn unpleasant things from his enemies; they are ready enough to tell them.”
–Oliver Wendell Holmes
“The most I can do for my friend is simply to be his friend. I have no wealth to bestow on him. If he knows that I am happy in loving him, he will want no other reward. Is not friendship divine in this? ”
–Henry David Thoreau
“Friendship that flows from the heart cannot be frozen by adversity, as the water that flows from the spring cannogt congeal in winter. ”
–James Fenimore Cooper
“Friendship without self interest is one of the rare and beautiful things in life. ”
–James Francis Byrnes
True friendship’s laws are by this rule express’d, Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.”
–Alexander Pope
“One can never speak enough of the virtues, the dangers, the power of shared laughter. ”
–Francoise Sagan
Friendship is always a sweet responsibilty, never an oppourtunity.
–Kahil Gibran
“There is magic in the memory of schoolboy friendships; it softens the heart, and even affects the nervous system of those who have no heart. ”
–Bejamin Disraeli
I no doubt deserved my enemies, but I don’t believe I deserved my friends.
–Walt Whitman
True friendship is never serene.
–Marquise de Sevigne
“When friends stop being frank and useful to each other, the whole world loses some of its radiance. ”
–Anatole Broyard
Friends are born, not made.
–Henry Adams
“This communicating of a man’s self to his friend works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joy, and cutteth griefs in half. ”
–Francis Bacon
“Life is partly what we make it, and partly what is made by the friends whom we choose. ” –Tehyi Hsieh

Prodigals and Forgivenness

Forgivenness, Guilt, Repentance

I’ve read the story of the prodigal son, Father, and I realise that, as far as you’re concerned, repentance is a joyful thing. We confess our sins and you throw your arms around us. Big party – great stuff! But, Lord, some of us are diseased with this guilt thing. We’ve grown up with it, we’re weighed down with it, we can’t get rid of it. Far from saying we have no sin, we don’t accept forgiveness when it’s offered to us. We need to come within the orbit of your fondness, Father – to know that the wanting of us is really real. We need to feel clean as well as being clean. Thank you for being so nice. Work a little miracle so we can believe that, as well as saying it. Then we shall have something to say to the ones who don’t connect their sin with you at all. Amen
By Adrian Plass (I don’t know where from as I was given this quote without any reference)

I Have Nobody To Forgive Me

Forgivenness

Not long before she died in 1988, in a moment of surprising candor in television, Marghanita Laski, one of our best-known secular humanists and novelists, said, “What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness; I have nobody to forgive me.”
John Stott

Sacrificial Love Has Transforming Power

Forgivenness

In “The Christian Leader,” Don Ratzlaff retells a story Vernon Grounds came across in Ernest Gordon’s Miracle on the River Kwai. The Scottish soldiers, forced by their Japanese captors to labor on a jungle railroad, had degenerated to barbarous behavior, but one afternoon something happened. A shovel was missing. The officer in charge became enraged. He demanded that the missing shovel be produced, or else. When nobody in the squadron budged, the officer got his gun and threatened to kill them all on the spot . . . It was obvious the officer meant what he had said. Then, finally, one man stepped forward. The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel, and beat the man to death. When it was over, the survivors picked up the bloody corpse and carried it with them to the second tool check. This time, no shovel was missing. Indeed, there had been a miscount at the first check point. The word spread like wildfire through the whole camp. An innocent man had been willing to die to save the others! . . . The incident had a profound effect. . . The men began to treat each other like brothers. When the victorious Allies swept in, the survivors, human skeletons, lined up in front of their captors (and instead of attacking their captors) insisted: “No more hatred. No more killing. Now what we need is forgiveness.” Sacrificial love has transforming power.

Let bitterness take root and poison the rest of our life

Forgivenness

In his book. Lee: The Last Years, Charles Bracelen Flood reports that after the Civil War, Robert E. Lee visited a Kentucky lady who took him to the remains of a grand old tree in front of her house. There she bitterly cried that its limbs and trunk had been destroyed by Federal artillery fire. She looked to Lee for a word condemning the North or at least sympathizing with her loss. After a brief silence, Lee said, “Cut it down, my dear Madam, and forget it.” It is better to forgive the injustices of the past than to allow them to remain, let bitterness take root and poison the rest of our life.

Robert Bruce

Forgivenness, Sin

In the 14th century, Robert Bruce of Scotland was leading his men in a battle to gain independence from England. Near the end of the conflict, the English wanted to capture Bruce to keep him from the Scottish crown. So they put his own bloodhounds on his trail. When the bloodhounds got close, Bruce could hear their baying. His attendant said, “We are done for. They are on your trail, and they will reveal your hiding place.” Bruce replied, “It’s all right.” Then he headed for a stream that flowed through the forest. He plunged in and waded upstream a short distance. When he came out on the other bank, he was in the depths of the forest. Within minutes, the hounds, tracing their master’s steps, came to the bank. They went no farther. The English soldiers urged them on, but the trail was broken. The stream had carried the scent away. A short time later, the crown of Scotland rested on the head of Robert Bruce. The memory of our sins, prodded on by Satan, can be like those baying dogs–but a stream flows, red with the blood of God’s own Son. By grace through faith we are safe. No sin-hound can touch us. The trail is broken by the precious blood of Christ. “The purpose of the cross,” someone observed, “is to repair the irreparable.”
E. Lutzer, Putting Your Past Behind You, Here’s Life, 1990, p.42 – quoted off the Internet

All Is Forgiven I Love You

Forgivenness

There’s a Spanish story of a father and son who had become estranged. The son ran away, and the father set off to find him. He searched for months to no avail. Finally, in a last desperate effort to find him, the father put an ad in a Madrid newspaper. The ad read: Dear Paco, meet me in front of this newspaper office at noon on Saturday. All is forgiven. I love you. Your Father. On Saturday 800 Pacos showed up, looking for forgiveness and love from their fathers.
Bits & Pieces, October 15, 1992, Page 13

The Bell Keeps On Swinging

Forgivenness

Corrie ten Boom told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her. She had forgiven the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn’t sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest. “His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor,” Corrie wrote, “to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks.” “Up in the church tower,” he said, nodding out the window, “is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what? After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there’s a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope. But if we’ve been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn’t be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They’re just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down.” “And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force — which was my willingness in the matter — had gone out of them. They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts.”

I Have No Enemies

Forgivenness

When Narvaez, the Spanish patriot, lay dying, his father-confessor asked him whether he had forgiven all his enemies. Narvaez looked astonished and said, “Father, I have no enemies, I have shot them all.”
Source Unknown – quoted of the Internet

What God Forgives He Forgets

Forgivenness

In A Forgiving God in an Unforgiving World, Ron Lee Davis retells the true story of a priest in the Philippines, a much- loved man of God who carried the burden of a secret sin he had committed many years before. He had repented but still had no peace, no sense of God’s forgiveness.
In his parish was a woman who deeply loved God and who claimed to have visions in which she spoke with Christ and he with her. The priest, however, was skeptical. To test her he said, “The next time you speak with Christ, I want you to ask him what sin your priest committed while he was in seminary.” The woman agreed. A few days later the priest asked., “Well, did Christ visit you in your dreams?”
“Yes, he did,” she replied.
“And did you ask him what sin I committed in seminary?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what did he say?”
“He said, ‘I don’t remember'”
What God forgives, He forgets

David H. Bolton – quoted off the Internet

And another version:
A few years ago, rumors spread that a certain Catholic woman was having visions of Jesus. The archbishop decided to check her out.
‘Is it true, m’am, that you have visions of Jesus?’ asked the cleric.
‘Yes,’ the woman replied.
‘Well, the next time you have a vision, I want you to ask Jesus to tell you the sins that I confessed in my last confession. Please call me if anything happens.’
Ten days later the woman notified her spiritual leader of a recent apparition.
Within the hour the archbishop arrived. ‘What did Jesus say?’ he asked.
She took his hand and gazed deep into his eyes. ‘Bishop,’ she said, ‘these are his exact words: I CAN’T REMEMBER. ‘

Brennan Manning,The Ragamuffin Gospel: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up and Burnt Out (Portland, Ore.: Multnomah Press, 1990), 116-117

You’ve Forgotten Something

Forgivenness, Sin

In a dream, Martin Luther found himself being attacked by Satan. The devil unrolled a long scroll containing a list of Luther’s sins, and held it before him. On reaching the end of the scroll Luther asked the devil, “Is that all?” “No,” came the reply, and a second scroll was thrust in front of him. Then, after a second came a third. But now the devil had no more. “You’ve forgotten something,” Luther exclaimed triumphiantly. “Quickly write on each of them, ‘The blood of Jesus Christ God’s son cleanses us from all sins.'”
K. Koch, Occult Bondage and Deliverance, p. 10 – quoted off the Internet