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Quakers Quotes

Browse 13 quotes about Quakers.

Quakers Quotes

“From what I understand, signora, the Quakers, who are also known as Friends, are a small group of devout people who worship in silence, believing no one person can interpret the word of the Lord but all have the Light of God in them. When it shines, whoever feels it may address others--- the Friends--- who gather for meetings. They believe that under the loving eyes of God the Father, all men and women are equal." "Equal? Men and women?" Rosamund could scarce believe it. "Men and women, the nobles and the poor, the gentry and the servants-- even those with dusky skins or cream. All the same." "And they worship in silence? How?" "By communing with God in their own way.”

“When we really want to hear, and be heard by, someone we love, we do not go rushing into noisy crowds. Silence is a form of intimacy. That’s how we experience it with our friends and lovers. As relationships grow deeper and more intimate, we spend more and more quiet time alone with our lover. We talk in low tones about the things that matter. We do not shout them to each other. We may shout about them to others, but quietness is the hallmark of love.”

“Eliza, I'm eighty years old. All my life I've been trying one way or another to do people good. Whether that was right or not, I don't know, but it comes over me now that I'm excused from all that. I loved Homer, but I tried to do him good. .. the way I see it now, that was wrong, that was where I's led astray. From now on, Eliza, I don't figure there's a thing asked of me but to love my fellow men. . . .No, Eliza, as far as I can see, there's not another thing asked of me, from this day forward.”

“Sometimes painfully lost people can teach us lessons that we didn't think we needed to know, or be reminded of---the more history changes, the more it stays the same.”

“I feel in good spirits, though surrounded by an Army, the house full of officers, the yard alive with soldiers, - very peaceable sort of men, tho'. They eat like other folks, talk like them, and behave themselves with elegance; so I will not be afraid of them, that I won't.”

“Once a state has completely withered away, it is an extremely difficult task to re-create it, as Blackwell quickly discovered. If Blackwell had been under any illusions that the Quakers were a meek and passive people, he was in for a rude surprise. He was to find very quickly that devotion to peace, to liberty, and to individualism in no sense implies passive resignation to tyranny. Quite the contrary.”

“I was only beginning to enter into the infinite subtlety of Gregorian chant. It was - and remains - the only public prayer I have ever been able to engage in without feeling like a phony and a jackass. But then, one day in 1965 or so, it was simply abolished. With a stroke of his pen, Pope John XXIII - who had such good ideas about other things - declared that liturgy would henceforth be in the vernacular language of the people. That was, effectively, the end of Latin chant. Then all those monks and nuns who had devoted hours and hours a day began to sicken and fall into depressions, but nobody noticed for a long time. Maybe, as I can well believe, the music toned up their systems in some mysterious way. Or perhaps chant really was a language that God understood. Faced with numerous liturgical scholas shrieking away in the new vernacular hymns, Divinity may have covered its ears and withdrawn, leaving the monks to pine. We parish musicians, illiterate in anything written after the 13th century, stumbled around trying to score liturgies for guitar and bongo drums, trying to make sense of texts like "Eat his body! Drink his blood!" It wasn't because the music got so bad that I quit going to Mass, but it certainly was the beginning of my doubts about papal infallibility.”

“Having grown up knowing the formerly-mentioned historical figures on the bus are part of my family lineage, I was interested to learn that at least one, famed American psychic and suffragette, Amanda Theodosia Jones (of Puritan, Quaker and Huguenot heritage), was a self-proclaimed spiritualist. While aware of her inventions and business endeavors, I’d never been informed of her interest in metaphysics. Possessing a rather significant collection of her letters, poetry and other documents, it is perhaps my intimate relationship with this extraordinary individual inspiring my lifelong engagement with the psychic world. Indeed, in a recent dream, the spirit of Amanda T. Jones contacted me for reasons that will later be delineated. It is my ongoing contact with her and other spirit entities (including the Bodhisattva of Compassion, Kuan Yin), in fact, inspiring me to pen this manuscript. Having dedicated her 1910 autobiography, A Psychic Autobiography to William James, (known today as the Father of Modern Psychology and who’d encouraged her to author it), Ms. Jones therein described her psychic abilities and subsequent expansion into spiritualism. Her developing interest in mysticism led her to be among those at the forefront of the spiritualist movement that, for a period of time before and after the Civil War, captured the imagination of millions. In her poetry book (Poems, 1854–1906), she detailed a family incident leading to what could be considered as a miracle.”

“For the forest, the shared purpose is life itself, existence; everything extraneous stripped away by its necessity. Perhaps the goal of the spiritual life is to strip away everything frivolous as well, to pare it all back to the necessity of connection with the other. If we worship in the sincere presence of that power that takes away our forever-unmet need of things superfluous, we enter the real ecology of the meeting, where all is web.”