A Quote by Francois de La Rochefoucauld
The exceeding delight we take in talking about ourselves should give us cause to fear that we are giving but very little pleasureto our listeners.
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The extreme delight we experience in talking about ourselves should warn us that those who listen do not share it.
Fear is like a little garden spider that makes us jump back or the poor lost bee on the steering wheel that we blame for our automobile wreck. The problem in fear is our response - the way we treat animals or insects that frighten us. . . . Fear is also the universal scapegoat we blame when we take flight from intimacy or shrink up inside ourselves in a thousand little ways.
The personal boundaries, I think for comedians they're a little bit different anyway, but I think people - feel free to do stuff - It's interesting with comedians because when we walk on stage, oftentimes we're talking about ourselves for an hour and we're talking about very intimate details, so after hearing us for an hour, a lot of people feel very comfortable with us because they feel like they know us and they're our friends because we just told them our innermost secrets and details of our lives for an hour. What they forget is we know absolutely nothing about the audience.
Little by little, in telling Sam all these details, I got to see the bigger point of baseball, that it can give us back ourselves. We’re a crowd animal, a highly gregarious, communicative species, but the culture and the age and all the fear that fills our days have put almost everyone into little boxes, each of us all alone. But baseball, if we love it, gives us back our place in the crowd. It restores us.
Money and prices and markets don't give us exact information about how much our suburbs, freeways, and spandex cost. Instead, everything else is giving us accurate information: our beleaguered air and watersheds, our overworked soils, our decimated inner cities. All of these provide information our prices should be giving us but do not.
Of all times, it is Christmas when we must surely realize that there can be no true worship of Him who is the Christ without giving of ourselves. At this season let us, each one, reach out a little more generously in the spirit of the Christ. It is not enough to give toys and baubles. It is not enough to give alms to those in need.... It is also important that we give of ourselves with our alms.
Love is the miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives. I am not talking about vanity or arrogance . . . for that is not love. It is only fear. I am talking about having a great respect for ourselves and a gratitude for the miracle of our body and our mind.
Given our abundance, the burden of proof should always be on keeping, not giving. Why would you not give? We err by beginning with the assumption that we should keep or spend the money God entrusts to us. Giving should be the default choice. Unless there is a compelling reason to spend it or keep it, we should give it.
Many of us live our lives out of the fear of what other people think of us. We're waiting for someone to give us a permission slip that tells us it's OK to be ourselves. Don't try to be fearless or pretend you aren't impacted by fear. Just try to prevent fear from making your decisions for you.
The concept of God as a loving, all-powerful person, who created us, who has a plan for us, who issues commandments, and who is ready to receive us into Heaven, is a substantial concept, rich in meaning and significance for human life. But if we take away all this, and leave only the idea of an original cause, it is questionable whether the same word should even be used. By keeping the original word, we delude ourselves into thinking that we are talking about the same thing.
Giving up everything must mean giving over everything to kingdom purposes, surrendering everything to further the one central cause, loosening our grip on everything. For some of us, this may mean ridding ourselves of most of our possessions. But for all of us it should mean dedicating everything we retain to further the kingdom. (For true disciples, however, it cannot mean hoarding or using kingdom assets self-indulgently.)
If we're going to make progress on this issue [of contraception], we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future.
There's something profoundly liberating about giving, yet we don't do it often enough. It begs the question: why not? For some of us, our demanding schedules overtake our time to volunteer. For others, our fear of economic instability manifests a mindset dominated by pernicious lies like, "You can't afford to give" and "If you give, you won't have enough". However, truth of the matter is we simply cannot afford to not give back!
The single most empowering thing we can do for ourselves is to transform fear. While fear contains tremendous power, it doesn't propel us forward and upward, but, rather, drags us down and chains us to the past. Freeing ourselves from fear is a loving intention because, as fear subsides, we are better able to access the soft, sweet power of our hearts, which naturally leads to loving ourselves and others more freely and completely.
Have no fear of robbers or murderers. They are external dangers, petty dangers. We should fear ourselves. Prejudices are the real robbers; vices the real murderers. The great dangers are within us. Why worry about what threatens our heads or our purses? Let us think instead of what threatens our souls.
Although our moral conscience is a part of our consciousness, we do not feel ourselves on an equality with it. In this voice which makes itself heard only to give us orders and establish prohibitions, we cannot recognize our own voices; the very tone in which it speaks to us warns us that it expresses something within us that is not of ourselves.
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