Explore Quotes by John Powell

Life is something like a remarkable, exciting puzzle. It comes piece by piece in packages marked days.

More than 90 percent of all the prisoners in our American prisons have been abused as children.

God isn't calling us to a lonely, joyless existence with the promise of a delayed reward. God is calling us to live, to love and enjoy the challenge. God's formulas are roadmaps to freedom and peace. God is saying to us: "The only way to live is to be free. So save your heart for love and save your love for persons. Don't ever let any 'thing' own you. Don't let money or fame or power or the pursuit of pleasure put a ring in your nose and lead you around. Love persons and use things." And of course, this is the only way to live, to be free.

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.

It is essential that our love be liberating, not possessive. We must at all times give those we love the freedom to be themselves. Love affirms the other as other. It does not possess and manipulate another as mine.

He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

Love demands that I learn how to focus my attention on the needs of those I love.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection.

Each child is sent into this world by God with a "Unique Message" to deliver, a new personal act of love to bestow

We cannot "psychologize" the grace of God. God's actions are outside and above our human sciences.

Love supposes, is, and does many things, but basically it is practiced in the act of sharing.

If you knew me yesterday, please do not think that it is the same person that you are meeting today.

You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.

There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won't feel any pain.

Pain is a teacher from whom we can learn much.