Top 50 Quotes & Sayings by John Powell

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

When we contact each other, we change each other. We are constantly making each other.

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.

Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection.

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

Our lives are shaped by those who love us

Love supposes, is, and does many things, but basically it is practiced in the act of sharing.

Attitudes are capable of making the same experience either pleasant or painful.

By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go.

A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.

You can't reinvent yourself for every movie.

Love is not a feeling to be felt, it's an action to be learned.

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.

God isn't calling us to a lonely, joyless existence with the promise of a delayed reward. God is calling us to live, to love and enjoy the challenge. God's formulas are roadmaps to freedom and peace. God is saying to us: "The only way to live is to be free. So save your heart for love and save your love for persons. Don't ever let any 'thing' own you. Don't let money or fame or power or the pursuit of pleasure put a ring in your nose and lead you around. Love persons and use things." And of course, this is the only way to live, to be free.

Each child is sent into this world by God with a "Unique Message" to deliver, a new personal act of love to bestow

Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

A good listener truly wants to know the speaker.

To tell you my thoughts is to locate myself in a category. To tell you about my feelings is to tell you about me.

Comparison is the death of true self-contentment.

What is disgraceful and outrageous is that 18,000 children die of hunger every day, every one of them a preventable death. That's what the controversy should be about.

Communication works for those who work at it.

If you knew me yesterday, please do not think that it is the same person that you are meeting today.

If you knew me in the past, please do not think that I am the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more of life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed and I am different.

I wanted to play music from the age of seven. I suddenly fell in love with it and that's what I was going to do, or to be involved with music. It was just speaking to me at a level that as a seven year old I suddenly realized the world was capable of supporting in my head a lot more than what I was understanding verbally and visually.

God is to us like the sky to a small bird, which cannot see its outer limits and cannot reach its distant horizons, but can only lose itself in the greatness and immensity of the blueness.

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

There's the whole myth about rocket science. It's really not that hard. It's not brain surgery.

He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.

There are only two potential tragedies in life, and dying young isn't one of them. These are the two real tragedies: If you go through life and you don't love ... and if you go through life and you don't tell those whom you love that you love them.

You just don't make decisions about what you're going to be like when you are old. I know that I am making that decision right now. Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world and God in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take over in old age. Every time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical old man. Our yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

God alone can make a man a believer. Our part is to accept or reject his initiative.

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine.

We cannot "psychologize" the grace of God. God's actions are outside and above our human sciences.

The only love worthy of a name is unconditional.

Life is something like a remarkable, exciting puzzle. It comes piece by piece in packages marked days.

I also see the world of religion. I see some of my brothers and sisters trying to be religious without being fully human. They seem a little rigid and narrow at times, wanting to be holy, but not human. They seem to be winning a place in heaven, without realizing or enjoying the beauty of earth. They keep the ten commandments, but their observances look so joyless. Such a world seems small and the air in that world is stale.

Pain is a teacher from whom we can learn much.

What are the "ifs" and "buts" that limit my enjoyment of life?

Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.

There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won't feel any pain.

The real gift of love is self disclosure.

Playing is much, much harder than composing in my opinion, becoming a player. If you want to be a player for all your life either you decide not to do it professionally and just enjoy it and just do it every weekend, but if you want to be a professional musician- hardest thing I could imagine and I really wasn't capable of doing it.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

Love demands that I learn how to focus my attention on the needs of those I love.

The genius of Christian spirituality is to integrate [the] spirit of possession with the spirit of dispossession. The spirit of dispossession implies that all the good and delightful things of this world are never allowed to own, possess, or shackle me. Dispossession implies that I am always free, my own person, liberated from the tyranny that possession can easily exercise over us.

You and I can profit by asking ourselves: What do I see when I look through the lens of my attitude toward myself? Am I more a critic than a friend? Do I look beyond the surface blemishes to find the truly beautiful and unique person that I am? Or do I play the destructive "comparison game"? What verdict does the juror of my mind pass on me: "good at heart" or "guilty on all counts"?

I have to be honest in asking myself: Do I really want to know and do God's will? Or is it rather that I want God to do my will? Do I go to God with the assurance that I want only to know and do his will? Or do I rather first make my own plans and then insist that God make my dreams come true?

You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.