“The Master would frequently assert that holiness was less a matter of what one did than of what one allowed to happen.”
Trust
One Minute Wisdom (1989)
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Anthony de Mello 135
Indian writer 1931–1987Related quotes

“The facts are always less than what really happened.”

“One can be the master of what one does, but never of what one feels.”

“The length of one's days matters less than the love of one's family and friends.”
Statement just before becoming the longest lived U.S. President as quoted in "Ford eclipses Reagan as oldest ex-president" in USA Today (10 November 2006) http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-11-10-ford_x.htm
2000s

[199705201832.LAA28393@wall.org, 1997]
Usenet postings, 1997

“I assert that no army ever did more for that race than the one I commanded at Savannah.”
As quoted in Memoirs of General W.T. Sherman, 2nd ed., D. Appleton & Co., 1913 (1889). Reprinted by the Library of America, 1990<!--, ,--> p. 729.
1880s
Context: My aim then was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. 'Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' I did not want them to cast in our teeth what General Hood had once done at Atlanta, that we had to call on their slaves to help us to subdue them. But, as regards kindness to the race..., I assert that no army ever did more for that race than the one I commanded at Savannah.

Campaign speech http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/08/08/remarks-president-campaign-event, Grand Junction High School, Colorado, , quoted in
Furthermore compare what Obama said in 2009
2012
Context: Now, when we came together, we knew restoring that bargain — that deal, that compact — was not going to be easy. We knew it would take more than one year or one term or maybe even one President, because we had seen what had happened in the previous decade. Jobs had moved overseas. Folks were working harder and harder, but their wages or incomes, they were staying flat, sometimes even going down. The cost of everything from health care to college was going up. And then, it all culminated in the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — a crisis that robbed too many of our friends and our neighbors of jobs, the value of their homes, their savings. And all that pushed the American Dream even further out of reach for too many working people.

“All machines knew what would happen to them when their masters lost faith in their infallibility.”
Source: Absolution Gap (2003), Chapter 5 (p. 75)