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"I've shepherded a good many people through their lives, I've baptized babies by the hundred, and all that time I have felt as though a great part of life was closed to me. Your mother says I was like Abraham. But I had no old wife and no promise of a child. I was just getting by on books and baseball and fried-egg sandwiches."
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Exlpore more Experience quotes
"Of two pleasures, if there be one which all or almost all who have experience of both give a decided preference, irrespective of any feeling of moral obligation to prefer it, that is the more desirable pleasure."
"There is more experience on the field of justification than on the camp of training. Sometimes, you got to take actions to learn more."
"It is not age but experience that brings wisdom."
"From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn."
"Life is a book. Read it. But do not forget to write yours."
"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young."
"I don't know of any other creature on earth other than man that will sit in a corner and cry because of some painful experience in the past."
"Religion is an experience, not a bunch of doctrines."
"You, the unhappy young! Try to take a leaf out of the old happy's book!"
"What is written is merely the dregs of experience."
Explore more quotes by Marilynne Robinson
"There is no justice in love, no proportion in it, and there need not be, because in any specific instance it is only a glimpse or parable of an embracing, incomprehensible reality. It makes no sense at all because it is the eternal breaking in on the temporal. So how could it subordinate itself to cause or consequence?"
"Any father must finally give his child up to the wilderness and trust to the providence of God. It seems almost a cruelty for one generation to beget another when parents can secure so little for their children, so little safety, even in the best circumstances. Great faith is required to give the child up, trusting God to honor the parents' love for him by assuring that there will indeed be angels in that wilderness."
"The parents of these young soldiers would come to me and ask how the Lord could allow such a thing. I felt like asking them what the Lord would have to do to tell us He didn't allow something. But instead I would comfort them by saying we would never know what their young men had been spared. Most of them took me to mean they were spare the trenches and the mustard gas, but what I really meant was that they were spared the act of killing."
"I have mentioned the qualitative difference between Christianity as an ethic and Christianity as an identity. Christian ethics goes steadfastly against the grain of what we consider human nature: the first will be last, to him who asks give, turn the other cheek, judge not. Identity on the other hand appeals to a constellation of the worst human impulses. It is worse than ordinary tribalism because it assumes a more than virtuous "us on one side and on the other a "them who are very doubtful indeed, who are in fact a threat to all we hold dear."
"Scatter the names of all those who have ever lived over the surface of the knowable cosmos, and it would remain, for all purposes, as unnamed as it was before the small, anomalous flicker of human life appeared on this small, wildly atypical planet."
"Even as children they had been good in fact, but also in order to be seen as good. There was something disturbingly like hypocrisy about it all..."
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