Lord save us all from a hope tree that has lost the faculty of putting out blossoms.
That tree is very old, but I never saw prettier blossoms on it than it now bears. That tree grows new wood each year. Like that apple tree, I try to grow a new little wood each year.
Among us, I am happy to say, old age is honorable, and regarded as a blessing from the Lord. It is our duty to desire to live long upon the earth, that we may do as much good as we possibly can. I esteem it a great privilege to have the opportunity of living in mortality. The Lord has sent us here "for a wise and glorious purpose," and it should be our business to find out what that purpose is and then to order our lives accordingly.
Love is faith's flower, hope is its stem. Grace comes into us by faith, like water through the roots of a tree. It rises in us by hope, like sap rising through the trunk of a tree. And it matures in us by [love] as fruit matures on a tree's branches, fruit for the neighbor's eating.
My body, now close to fifty years of age, has become an old tree that bears bitter peaches, a snail which has lost its shell, a bagworm separated from its bag; it drifts with the winds and clouds that know no destination. Morning and night I have eaten traveler's fare, and have held out for alms a pilgrim's wallet.
All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the plowman, splashing the wintry mold, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart.
I hope for your help to explore and protect the wild ocean in ways that will restore the health and, in so doing, secure hope for humankind. Health to the ocean means health for us.
In old age our bodies are worn-out instruments, on which the soul tries in vain to play the melodies of youth. But because the instrument has lost its strings, or is out of tune, it does not follow that the musician has lost his skill.
We know that prayer in and of itself cannot save us, but carrying it out before God can. For when the Lord's eyes are upon us He sanctifies us, as the sun warms everything upon which it shines.
So while our art cannot, as we wish it could, save us from wars, privation, envy, greed, old age, or death, it can revitalize us amidst it all.
While on that old grey stone I sat
Under the old wind-broken tree,
I knew that One is animate,
Mankind inanimate phantasy.
The beauty of having nothing to lose, is you learn the beauty of having everything to gain.
This is where hope lives.
Hope can’t be taken.
Hope can’t be lost.
Hope can’t be broken.
When we are boiled down to what we are as people. We are not love, because we hope to love, we are not money or who we hold, because we hope to have and to hold. We are not religion or God, because we enter into belief in the hope we get something back for ourselves. We are not a soul.
We are hope.
We live in this irreparably broken world, and I don't wish to deny reality, but the amazing thing to me is not that we refuse to relinquish hope as a species. The amazing thing is that we're right to hold on to hope. The world may be broken, but hope is not crazy. ... Obviously not all stories end happily. We don't always have good fortune, but hope gives us, as a species and as individuals, what we otherwise wouldn't have: A chance.
I feel like a tree. A tree doesn't feel a duty to start doing something about the earth from which it comes. A tree just has to bear fruit, and leaves and blossoms. It doesn't feel grateful to the earth.
My ceiling's broken, my car's got a puncture and we've just lost two matches. But I've got my health and I'll ask the big man upstairs why he didn't give us a point.
As the tree is fertilized by its own broken branches and fallen leaves, and grows out of its own decay, so men and nations are bettered and improved by trial, and refined out of broken hopes and blighted expectations.