Points to Ponder
"What you love, what you desire, what you think about, you are photographing, printing, on the walls of your immortal nature. And just as today, thousands of years after the artists have been gathered to the dust, we may go into Egyptian temples and see the figures on their walls in all the freshness of their first coloring, as if the painter had but laid down his pencil a moment ago, so, on your hearts, youthful evils, the sins of your childhood, the misdeeds of your earliest days, may leave ugly shapes, that no tears, and no repentance will ever wipe out. Nothing can do away with 'the marks of that which once hath been.' What are you painting on the chambers of imagery in your hearts?... Everything which you do leaves its effect with you forever, just as long-forgotten meals are in your blood and bones today. Every act that a man performs has printed itself upon his soul; it has become a part of himself..." [Maclaren in D. L. Moody, One Thousand and One Thoughts from My Library, (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, n.d.), p. 122-123]
"Many a pluck the enemy gives at Christ's doves, but they shall never pluck them away from him." [The Beautifes of Ebenezer Erskine edited by Samuel McMillan, (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 1850), p. 602]
"Forgiveness is enjoined on us at least as much for our benefit as for the offender's... It is the cauterization of our wounds. Alexander the Great is supposed to have gone to the philosopher Diogenes, whom he greatly admired, with an offer to grant Diogenes any favor he might name. He found Diogenes sunbathing. 'Ask for whatever you desire,' said Alexander, 'and I will grant it.' Diogenes replied, 'Stand out of the way of the sun'... What Diogenes says to Alexander is that he refused to have even a moment of sunshine obscured by the conqueror of the world. Forgiveness can amount to the same refusal." [Garret Keizer, The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin, (San Francisco: Josey-Bass, 2002), p. 245-246]
"If you have tried to do something but couldn't, you are far better off than if you tried to do nothing and succeeded." [John T. Ragland, Jr., in Everyday Quotations edited by Jack Maguire, (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Direct, Inc., 1998), p. 116]
