A Quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
The pursuit of purity is not about the suppression of lust, but about the reorientation of one's life to a larger goal.
Related Quotes
The essence of chastity is not the suppression of lust, but the total orientation of one's life towards a goal. Without such a goal, chastity is bound to become ridiculous. Chastity is the sine qua non of lucidity and concentration.
As you begin to feel this enormous shift of consciousness, called multisensory perception, emerging in your awareness, you begin to reorient yourself. It's a reorientation that occurs toward yourself as more than a mind and a body; it's a reorientation that occurs toward others; toward your life as meaningful, rather than predetermined. It's a reorientation that occurs toward the universe as alive, wise and compassionate, instead of inert (which means dead) and random.
When the founders wrote about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they didn't mean longer vacations and more comfortable hammocks. They meant the pursuit of learning. The pursuit of improvement and excellence. In hard work is happiness.
That's what this thing called Christian life is all about, isn't it. Going . . . yet not knowing. As followers of our Lord we believe He leads us in a certain direction . . . or in pursuit of a precise goal.
Hardly anyone today thinks about sex. We joke about it, dream about it, watch movies about it, listen to music about it, lust about it. But we don't ever really think about it.
New York Times v. Sullivan was about the suppression of speech in the South [during the 1960s]. Today's version of suppression is just another verse of the same song.
My life's goal is not to write books; my life's goal is to know God better today. The neat thing about a goal like that is you can achieve it. Faith is constant; it's a relationship.
Personally, I've never had it as a goal in life to be happy. Seems impossible to achieve. Even the Declaration of Independence seems to acknowledge this. They talk about the pursuit of happiness, not happiness itself.
Lust is about satisfaction. Love is about sacrificing, serving, surrendering, sharing, supporting, and even suffering for others. Most love songs are actually lust songs.
I've talked about that with friends, about what genre makes sense to choose for each record and the strategy around that... Sometimes it's more about the moment of time, and other times it's more about the sound of the song. Sometimes it's about what's going on in larger life, in politics.
It's difficult to talk about [W.S.] Merwin's poems, as it's hard to talk about a feeling or a smell. It is what it is, but so much so that it overwhelms both sense and the senses. I aspire to something about his work, that imbues his poems, though I'm not sure I could say what that is. A purity, maybe, the kind of purity that comes from being beaten, like steel.
The miasma of fear that is created through voter suppression is as much about terrifying people about trying to vote as it is about actually blocking their ability to do so.
Get a life. A real life. Not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.
Sabbath, in the first instance, is not about worship. It is about work stoppage. It is about withdrawal from the anxiety system of Pharaoh, the refusal to let one’s life be defined by production and consumption and the endless pursuit of private well-being.
I was asking about lust, wasn?t I? I was fairly certain of it. But isn?t love supposed to come before lust? It does in the dictionary.
I used to be so convinced that happiness was the goal, yet all those years I was chasing after it I was unhappy in the pursuit. Maybe the goal really should be a life that values honor, duty, good work, friends and family.
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