
“Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way… God can give us the perfect way.”
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
Prayer from Apollo 8, on Christmas Day (25 December 1968)
Context: Give us, O God, the vision which can see Your love in the world in spite of human failure.
Give us the faith to trust Your goodness in spite of our ignorance and weakness.
Give us the knowledge that we may continue to pray with understanding hearts.
And show us what each one of us can do to set forward the coming of the day of universal peace.
“Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way… God can give us the perfect way.”
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
Source: My Utmost for His Highest: Traditional Updated Edition
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)
“The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.”
This a response to William Wordsworth's famous statement: "The world is too much with us late and soon."
O Taste and See : New Poems (1964)
Odysseus to Kentaur, Book VIII, line 829
The Odyssey : A Modern Sequel (1938)
Context: But we, O blockhead, with dogged spite and armored love
shall force those deaf dark powers to grow ears and hear us!
I know that God is earless, eyeless, and heartless too,
a brainless Dragon Worm that crawls on earth and hopes
in anguish and then in secret that we'll give him soul,
for then he, too, may sprout ears, eyes, to match his growth,
but God is clay in my ten fingers, and I mould him!
Source: In the Sanctuary of the Soul: A Guide to Effective Prayer
In the last lines of his lecture at the Congress of the Jewish Scientific Institute Vilnius, in 1935, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 58
after 1930
"Into the Fire"
Song lyrics, The Rising (2002)
"O eterne deus"