And I cried in my spirit to the Lord, 'We are all thieves, we are all thieves, we have taken the Scriptures in words and know nothing of them in ourselves.' " -- Margaret Fell, 1652
 

"Be patterns, be examples in all countries, places, islands, nations, wherever you come, so that your carriage and life may preach among all sorts of people, and to them." -- George Fox, 1656
 

"Walk cheerfully over the world, answering to that of God in every one, whereby you may be a blessing, and make the witness of God in them to bless you." -- George Fox, 1656
 

"Stand still in that which is pure, after ye see yourselves; and then mercy comes in. After thou seest thy thoughts, and the temptations, do not think, but submit; and then power comes." -- George Fox, 1658
 

"Stand still in that which shows and discovers; and then doth strength immediately come. And stand still in the Light, and submit to it, and the other will be hush'd and gone; and then content comes." -- George Fox, 1658
 

"We do utterly deny all outward wars and strife and fighting with outward weapons, for any end or under any pretense whatsoever. And this is our testimony to the whole world." -- Declaration to Charles II, 1661
 

"The spirit of Christ, by which we are guided, is not changable, so as once to command us from a thing as evil and again to move unto it..." -- Declaration to Charles II, 1661
 

The spirit of Christ, which leads us into all Truth, will never move us to fight and war against any man with outward weapons, neither for the kingdom of Christ nor for the kingdoms of this world." -- Declaration to Charles II, 1661
 

"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath different names; it is, however, pure and proceeds from God. It is deep and inward, confined to no forms of religion..." -- John Woolman, 1761
 

"There is a principle which is pure, placed in the human mind, which in different places and ages hath different names... In whomsoever this takes root and grows, of what nation soever, they become brethen." -- John Woolman, 1761
 

"O that we who declare against wars, and acknowledge our trust be in God only, may walk in the light, and therein examine our foundation and motives in holding great estates!" -- John Woolman, 1793
 

"May we look upon our treasures, the furniture in our houses, and our garments, and try whether the seeds of war have nourishment in these our possessions." -- John Woolman, 1793
 

"Friends, meet together and know one another in that which is eternal, which was before the world was." -- George Fox, 1657
 

Walk cheerfully over the world answering that of God in every man." -- George Fox 1656
 

"To me, worship is recognising and communing with the divine, whether it is within myself, in others, or in the world. The pre-condition of worship is my belief in worth-ship, my own and that of other people." (British YM, 1986)
 

"Take heed, dear Friends, to the promptings of love and truth in your hearts. Trust them as the leadings of God whose Light shows us our darkness and brings us to new life." (From the British YM Advices)
 

"There is a turning of the soul from the darkness to the light; from the spirit of deceit to the spirit of truth; from all false appearances and imaginations about holiness to that which the eternal light manifesteth to be truly so.
Isaac Penington
 

'You will say, "Christ saith this, and the apostles say this," but what canst thou say? Art thou a child of the Light, and hast thou walked in the Light, and what thou speakest, is it inwardly from God?' - George Fox
 

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
 

"The easiest way to predict the future is to invent it." -- XPARK motto.
 

"Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." -- Laurens van der Post
 

"We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched." -- Ludwig Wittgenstein
 

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." -- Philip K. Dick
 

"We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world." -- Buddha
 

"We see what we believe, and not just the contrary; and to change what we see, it is sometimes necessary to change what we believe." -- Jeremy Narby
 

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us." --Ralph Waldo Emerson
 

"Don't pray to escape trouble. Don't pray to be comfortable in your emotions. Pray to do the will of God in every situation. Nothing else is worth praying for." --Samuel M. Shoemaker
 

"I won't take my religion from any man who never works except with his mouth." -- Carl Sandburg
 

"We would suggest, however, that the world suffers more from its politicians than from its prophets. Social progress toward the good life might move more surely if [we] would dare to credit more highly the inner voice of moral guidance..."
Cooperation and Coercion as Methods of Social Change, Vincent D. Nicholson
 

"Quakerism combines in religious worship two elements which are usually considered incompatible, a mystical approach to God and a social relation to our fellows.
A Religious Solution to the Social Problem, Howard H. Brinton
 

The lonely mystic knows only the vertical relation to God, the "social gospeler" too often only the horizontal relation to man, but group mysticism takes account of both God and man."
A Religious Solution to the Social Problem, Howard H. Brinton
 

“Our task is to bind up the broken-hearted, to be a cup of strength in times of agony, to set men on their feet when the foundations seem to be caving in, and to feed and comfort the little children amidst the wreckage of war.”
Rethinking Quaker Principles, Rufus M. Jones
 

"A major issue for the Society of Friends today is whether its emphasis is to be, once more, for this type of open, expectant religion, or whether it is to seek for comfortable formulations that seem to ensure its safety.”
Rethinking Quaker Principles, Rufus M. Jones
 

"How can we be sure that God is real, and not just a creation of our wishes?"
Reality Of The Spiritual World, Thomas R. Kelly
 

"But there is a wholly different way of being sure that God is real. It is not an intellectual proof, a reasoned sequence of thoughts. It is the fact that men experience the presence of God."
Reality Of The Spiritual World, Thomas R. Kelly
 

"Into our lives come times when, all unexpectedly, He shadows over us, steals into the inner recesses of our souls, and lifts us up in a wonderful joy and peace."
Reality Of The Spiritual World, Thomas R. Kelly
 

"When all has been said, the most skilled of us is only a novice in the art of meditation. None of us is too skilled to profit by the experience of others or too ignorant to be unable to help someone."
The Quaker Meeting Howard E. Collier
 

"The Quaker meeting for worship and the Quaker meeting for business are unique institutions. It is their purpose to expose the soul to the Light from God..."
The Quaker Doctrine of Inward Peace, Howard H. Brinton
 

"If the soul is able to find in the silence union with the peace of God at the heart of existence, then inward peace is secured and new knowledge and power received."
The Quaker Doctrine of Inward Peace, Howard H. Brinton
 

"What does it mean, this trusting in God? I think it means that we are certain that spiritual power is life's precious foundation."
Christ in Catastrophe, Emil Fuchs
 

"We are called as nations and as individuals to take a great task, to lose our lives and to find the life and power which overcomes distrust and hatred and cowardice."
Christ in Catastrophe, Emil Fuchs
 

"Let us hear the challenge of Christ. There may be hard disappointment and bitter suffering on the road he points to. He never promised quick or easy victory."
Christ in Catastrophe, Emil Fuchs
 

"Only by our suffering can we overcome prejudices bred in millions of people by the inability of Christians to speak to their times."
Christ in Catastrophe, Emil Fuchs
 

"When will the Christian conscience be strong enough to unite those who call themselves after Jesus? When will we be ashamed to call Christian those who trust in the sword?"
Christ in Catastrophe, Emil Fuchs
 

"To discover what we really want as compared to what at first we think we want, we must go below the surface of self-centered desires to the deeper level where the real Self resides."
Reaching Decisions: The Quaker Method, Howard H. Brinton
 

"The deepest Self of all is that Self which we share with all others. This is the one Vine of which we all are branches, the Life of God on which our own individual lives are based."
Reaching Decisions: The Quaker Method, Howard H. Brinton
 

"The religious genius, like the scientific genius, must be allowed to give to those who are not geniuses the full measure of guidance."
Reaching Decisions: The Quaker Method, Howard H. Brinton
 

"How immensely important religion is to wholeness and to all forms of healing. A new theory and practice of healing has come into being during my lifetime ..."
Experiment With A Life, Dr. Howard E. Collier
 

"The Challenge of the Vision; of Recognition; of Swarthmore Hill; of the Outgoing Spirit; of Friendship; of Strength; of Steadfastness; of the Sowing; and The Challenge of Joy."
Let Your Lives Speak, Elfrida Vipont Foulds
 

"If we could take up the challenges of 1652, we should know that the Lord is at work in the darkness; that the ocean of love and light is unquenchable, yesterday, today and forever..."
Let Your Lives Speak, Elfrida Vipont Foulds
 

"Oh, why don't Quakers preach what you practice?"
Can Quakerism Speak To The Times? John H. Hobart
 

"Quakerism today lacks the force, power, and convincement, that carried it through its first century of oppressive and bitter persecution. What happened to the prophetic zeal and world vision of its founders?"
Can Quakerism Speak To The Times?, John H. Hobart
 

"A Quakerism that is concerned only with the preservation of inherited testimonies and the recorded experiences of early Friends, is totally inadequate for the tasks which now confront our Society."
Can Quakerism Speak To The Times?, John H. Hobart
 

"Our task is not to rewrite their books in modern language, it is to relive their experience and, by so doing, make it our own. Let your lives speak, the words must come out of the life.
Can Quakerism Speak To The Times?, John H. Hobart
 

"Every man hides for this purpose, for every man is Adam and finds himself in Adam's situation. To escape responsibility for his life, he turns existence into a system of hideouts."
The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism, Martin Buber
 

"The task of man, of every man, according to hasidic teaching, is to affirm for God's sake the world and himself and by this very means to transform both."
The Way of Man According to the Teachings of Hasidism, Martin Buber
 

"The real strength of early Quakerism lay in the quiet inconspicuous growth of small meetings in many homes where sometimes as few as three or four waited upon God in silence..."
How They Became Friends, Howard H. Brinton
 

"Men seek, often without realizing it, to know what they are and what may arise from the depths of their own being to give meaning and direction to their life.
How They Became Friends, Howard H. Brinton
 

"If the soul knows God in His creatures, that is only evening light: if it knows His creatures in God, that is morning light: but if it know God as He who alone is Being, that is the clear light of midday." -- Meister Eckart
 

"God can lead us by more ways than one. Some he makes ready before he sends them out; others he sends out that they may be made ready."
The Candle, The Lantern, The Daylight Mildred Binns Young
 

"The Society of Friends has a great task ahead of it: the translation of its religious and ethical experiences into a conscious understanding of the way in which the love which we treasure can be produced, defended, and extended."
The Evolutionary Potential of Quakerism Kenneth E. Boulding
 

"What ails us? How do we walk humbly with our God into the future? How do we even get turned around facing the future instead of backing into it with our eyes on the past?"
What Doth the Lord Require of Thee?, Mildred Binns Young
 

"Presence implies a power to influence, to engage with the other; but it means equally a willingness to be vulnerable enough to be influenced by, and even to be changed by the experience."
On Being Present Where You Are, Douglas V. Steere
 

"To be present is to be vulnerable, to be able to be hurt, to be willing to be spent - but it is also to be awake, alive, and engaged actively in the immediate assignment that has been laid upon us."
On Being Present Where You Are, Douglas V. Steere
 

"Mysticism is the type of religion which puts the emphasis on immediate awareness of relation with God, on direct and intimate consciousness of the Divine Presence". -- Rufus Jones
 

"Ethical Mysticism first withdraws from the world to the inward Divine Source of Light, and then returns with strength renewed, insight cleared, and desire quickened to bind all life together in the bonds of love."
Ethical Mysticism in the Society of Friends Howard H. Brinton
 

"Without time eternity would be beyond our grasp, and without eternity time would be too limited to require our reverence and worship."
Evolution and the Inward Light, Howard H. Brinton
 

"Something happens in the course of understanding another's truth that irradiates and lights up one's own tradition.."
Mutual Irradiation: A Quaker View of Ecumenism, Douglas V. Steere
 

"Why then do we come here to sit together for our period of waiting expectant worship? We come because we sense that something is going on all the time, and we long to be brought more deeply into touch with it."
On Speaking Out Of The Silence, Douglas V. Steere
 

"I am doing something presumptuous: I am saying that in my judgement the only Quakerism that can survive in the future will have to be mystical, prophetic, and evangelical."
Quakerism of the Future, John Yungblut
 

"Why is it that we are born remembering, and live forgetting? Is this a joke that God would share with us, but that we can only laugh at when we have come full circle, and remember again?"
Born Remembering, Elise Boulding
 

"The unconscious is the only accessible source of religious experience." -- Karl Jung
 

"The Society of Friends can make its greatest contribution to community by continuing to be a religious society..."
A Place Called Community, Parker J. Palmer
 

"A religious society centers on the practice of a corporate worship which opens itself to continuing revelation."
A Place Called Community, Parker J. Palmer
 

"Listen, then, to the silence. Listen to what they say who say nothing. Open yourself to the silence within, to the Inward Light that shines in every soul."
Wholesight: The Spirit Quest, Frederick Parker-Rhodes
 

"Our first task is to love one another, to be valiant for the truth upon the earth, and to remain attentive to the true spirit in all that we do." Newton Garver,
Jesus, Jefferson, and the Task of Friends,
 

"To be a Quaker is not simply to subscribe to doctrines but to be convinced that one has known an ultimate reality which authenticates doctrine."
Leading and Being Led, Paul A. Lacey
 

"To be a Quaker is to know oneself capable of being taught now by the living Spirit of Truth..."
Leading and Being Led, Paul A. Lacey
 

"We cannot compel the inner voice to speak, we can only try to practice openness and attention, and when we hear the voice we can only practice minding and answering."
Education and the Inward Teacher, Paul A. Lacey
 

"If there is one phrase that can sweep together the whole ethical message of the Gospels, it might well be the "unlimited liability" which we bear for our fellow human beings in this world."
Prayer in the Contemporary World, Douglas V. Steere
 

"The highest patriotism is the patriotism that sees in love of country a means of service to the Kingdom of God, and it is perhaps the deepest of all the tragedies of war that it tends to deny this truth."
The Christian Patriot, Norman M. Thomas
 

"Religion binds back the soul into union with realities which refresh it, restore it, vivify it, and integrate it and complete it; i.e., put it in possession of the whole of itself."
Religion as Reality, Life And Power, Rufus M. Jones
 

"The most striking thing about the type of human life which I should suppose is normal is its infinite reach."
Religion as Reality, Life And Power, Rufus M. Jones
 

"There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them too closely to disown themselves."
Meister Eckhart
 

"But the first step to obedience is the flaming vision of the wonder of such a life, a vision which comes occasionally to us all"
Holy Obedience, Thomas R. Kelly
 

"Once having the vision, the second step to holy obedience is this: Begin where you are. Obey now. Use what little obedience you are capable of, even if it be like a grain of mustard seed."
Holy Obedience, Thomas R. Kelly
 

"As I see our mission, across the years behind us and in front of us, it is to demonstrate and exhibit a type of religion which reveals the life of God in the lives of men."
The Vital Cell, Rufus M. Jones
 

"One of the most important concerns of this vital cell ought to be for the spiritual nurture of the children and youth of the meeting."
The Vital Cell, Rufus M. Jones
 

"It is our duty to seek emotional truth, as it is to seek intellectual truth, and indeed as we seek them we shall find that they are not two truths, but one."
The Practice of The Love of God, Kenneth Boulding
 

"Unless we rediscover the love of God itself whose expression is the reason and purpose of our Society, the very Society that we cherish dwindles into nothingness."
The Practice of The Love of God, Kenneth Boulding
 

"The love of country without the love of God is a destructive emotion; it leads into selfishness, pride, arrogance, injustice, cruelty, domination and war..."
The Practice of The Love of God, Kenneth Boulding
 

"Without the love of God the command to love our neighbor is a monstrous sarcasm, the imposition on mankind of impossible conflict between the moral sense and the will."
The Practice of The Love of God, Kenneth Boulding
 

"'Behold: in peace is my bitterest bitterness' - the words of the prophet Isaiah say what our hearts should say but cannot."
The City of God And The City of Man, Gilbert H. Kilpack
 

"Though our hearts break with bitterness, we are dumb, or we chatter without sense, for we are a people who lack even the wisdom of lamentation."
The City of God And The City of Man, Gilbert H. Kilpack
 

"What bitterness is to be compared with the bitterness of those who have thought good might come from evil."
The City of God And The City of Man, Gilbert H. Kilpack
 

"The upshot of most careful analysis is that the central trouble is in our inner lives rather than our outer condition..."
A Radical Experiment, D. Elton Trueblood
 

"Do you want to know whether a group is part of the true church? Very well, note whether they love each other; note whether their hearts are quickened by the love of the Living God; note whether they show that they have the mind of Christ in them. No other credentials are needed."
A Radical Experiment, D. Elton Trueblood
 

"Then and there that young man was given the flavor of man, for the primary ingredient of man's substance is love, love of God, love of man, and through love, a sense of unity with all creation."
The Flavor of Man, Jean Toomer
 

"We must make way to the sanctuary of the heart, and bring to earth the flavor of heaven, and bring to men the flavor of God.
The Flavor of Man, Jean Toomer
 

"For the real difference between happiness and joy is that one is grounded in this world, the other in eternity. Happiness cannot encompass suffering and evil. Joy can."
The Joy That Is Set Before Us, Elise Boulding
 

"Happiness depends on the present. Joy leaps into the future and triumphantly creates a new present out of it. It is a fruit of the spirit, a gift of God - no man can own it."
The Joy That Is Set Before Us, Elise Boulding
 

"I trust that I will never again be able to persuade myself that I am too tired to pray..."
The Joy That Is Set Before Us, Elise Boulding
 

"Instead of entering eagerly into the joy that is set before us, we are dispiritedly turning all our tomorrows into yesterdays before we ever reach them."
The Joy That Is Set Before Us, Elise Boulding