"Most people spend nearly all their energy trying not to change. This is what the philosopher William James meant when he wrote the mind’s main function was to be a fortress for protecting your ego from reality. When the mind has to accommodate a new fact, James argued, it doesn’t settle on the change to its model of reality that is most likely to reflect reality. It protects the fortress, calculating the smallest possible modification to its bulwarks that can account for the new fact." - Glenn Kelman http://www.standfirminfaith.com/?/sf/page/30480

"We realize more clearly than formerly that the world lies under the wrath and grace of God. We read in Jeremiah 45, 'Thus says the Lord: Behold, what I have built I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up....And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not; for behold, I am bringing evil upon all flesh...but I will give your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.' If we can save our souls unscathed out of the wreckage of our material possessions, let us be satisfied with that. If the Creator destroys the Divine handiwork, what right have we to lament the destruction of ours? It will be the task of our generation, not to 'seek great things,' but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a 'prize' from the burning building."  Bonhoeffer - Letters and Papers from Prison 157-158

From Maximos the Confessor.
“The three young men condemned no one, when they refused to adore the statue everyone else worshipped, … nor did Daniel condemn anyone, when he was thrown into the lions’ den—he simply preferred to die rather than offend God.”

Wendell Berry, re: modern sex education in the schools: “What we are actually teaching the young is an illusion of...purchasable safety, which encourages them to tamper prematurely, disrespectfully, and dangerously with a great power.”

"[Christian] education needs impact the aesthetics of human understanding. It needs to get hold of our gut and capture our imagination—that preconscious, emotional register on which we perceive the world and that, in turn, drives or ‘pulls’ our action… If the practices of Christian formation are truly going to reform our manners and deflect our dispositions to be aimed at the kingdom of God, then such practices need to engender rightly ordered erotic comprehension by renewing and reorienting our imaginations." - James K. A. Smith. from Desiring the Kingdom

Twice in the past few weeks, I’ve heard people who identify as Christians say, in all sincerity, that they didn’t see why anybody needs to go to church, that they can “find God” on their own. I hear some version of that a good bit. With that comes an entire worldview. It’s the complete liberation of the individual from any authority other than his or her own conscience and judgment. Outside an authoritative interpretive community in which one anchors one’s own understanding, the search for God really becomes a search for oneself, and the deification of one’s own attitudes and desires." - Rod Dreher, from “The Past as Bathwater”

"Well, they were hoping to have someone show them the big picture and expecting it to be a mirror. They were a little disappointed to find they weren't even in the picture, not even in the background."

“Done is better than prefect.” - a corporate motto near you

“Perfect never gets done.” - a seminary professor near you, in response

“Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.” - Lao Tzu

"...The sages have a hundred maps to give
That trace their crawling cosmos like a tree,
They rattle reason out through many a sieve
That stores the sand and lets the gold go free:
And all these things are less than dust to me
Because my name is Lazarus and I live." - G.K. Chesterton

From a 1909 G. K. Chesterton essay: "Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there is none more menacing and dangerous than the exultation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential and godliness is regarded as an offence."

“Dominus noster Christus veritatem se, non consuetudinem cognominavit.” – “Christ our Lord called himself truth, not custom.” - Tertullian