“Whenever we cannot love in the old, human way… God can give us the perfect way.”
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer
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.”
Corrie ten Boom (1892–1983) Dutch resistance hero and writer
Source: The Hiding Place: The Triumphant True Story of Corrie Ten Boom
Oswald Chambers (1874–1917) British missionary
Source: My Utmost for His Highest: Traditional Updated Edition
Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement
1950s, Loving Your Enemies (November 1957)
“The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see.”
Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Poet
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)
Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) Greek writer
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!
Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship
Source: In the Sanctuary of the Soul: A Guide to Effective Prayer
Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter
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
Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter
"Into the Fire"
Song lyrics, The Rising (2002)
Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) Medieval saint, prophetise, mystic and Doctor of Church
"O eterne deus"