Quotation Saturday ~ Ego, Vanity, Empathy, Truth

1 Sam. 12:24 “Only fear the LORD, and serve him in truth with all your heart: for consider how great things he hath done for you.”

EGO

“The biggest challenge after success is shutting up about it.” 
― Criss Jami

“The Ego is a veil between humans and God’.”
“In prayer all are equal.” 
― Rumi

“Opinion is really the lowest form of human knowledge. It requires no accountability, no understanding. The highest form of knowledge… is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world. It requires profound purpose larger than the self kind of understanding.” 
― Bill Bullard

“Accomplishments don’t erase shame, hatred, cruelty, silence, ignorance, discrimination, low self-esteem or immorality. It covers it up, with a creative version of pride and ego. Only restitution, forgiving yourself and others, compassion, repentance and living with dignity will ever erase the past.” 
― Shannon L. Alder

VANITY

“The wise do not buy into other people’s perceptions of who they are and what they are capable of. Instead, they bypass a person’s public persona and see who they are in their highest expression. When you see actions taken with integrity, instead of words only, you will then know a soul’s worth.” 
― Shannon L. Alder

“Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” 
― Jane Austen

“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” 
― Dale Carnegie

“Do you wish people to think well of you? Don't speak well of yourself.” 
― Blaise Pascal

EMPATHY

“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with a warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessness, that is a friend who cares.” 
― Henri J.M. Nouwen, Out of Solitude: Three Meditations on the Christian Life

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.” 
― Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

“Compassion hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors.” 
― Andrew Boyd

“Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection - or compassionate action.” 
― Daniel Goleman

TRUTH

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.” 
― Jim Morrison

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” 
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity. Equality is like gravity. We need it to stand on this earth as men and women, and the misogyny that is in every culture is not a true part of the human condition. It is life out of balance, and that imbalance is sucking something out of the soul of every man and woman who's confronted with it. We need equality. Kinda now.” 
― Joss Whedon

“The truth doesn't always set you free; people prefer to believe prettier, neatley wrapped lies” 
― Jodi Picoult

Pss. 51:6 “Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts: and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom.”

They Know It's Wrong...

Ezek. 34:11 “For thus saith the Lord GOD; Behold, I, even I, will both search my sheep, and seek them out.”

They Know It’s Wrong...

They know it’s wrong, yet they still do it, sin. Why is the moral compass so set on headed South? People know right from wrong yet they still CHOOSE to take the wrong over the right thing to do. They feel the temptation pulling on them like two magnets attracted to each other, the pull is too strong to show any kind of resistance.

Satan knows what flavor of sin to bait his hook with and time and time again man chooses to nibble on the bait instead of being the better fish and swim away. Take for example the political year. You can smell rancid satan odor in the air, you know you’re being pulled by only one thing and instead of resistance you jump in head first and go to battle with him. What does he offer that is so sweet tasting that gives you a reason not to fight?

God’s way is not an option, it is a necessity but so few feel HIS pull. They’d much rather jump in the dung heap and swim with the fetid parasites than dance with queer little angels who always seem too happy and filled with joy, choosing the higher road instead of squirming with the vermin on the lower road.

I think political years are poised so that we can really see with a bird’s eye view of just whom it is that we call a friend. I know after this election year is over I’ll still be holding on tight for the strength and armor of God to wrap around me and continue to show me the teensy bit of light that might still be left in all of them who chose to go south.

It’s not a left or right choice, it’s a north and south choice and so many people have chosen the south because of the warm comfortable fit that it gives them in an angry society. The bitter men all bundle together moving in a rampage shoulder to shoulder as they march for what THEY believe is right but if you look down upon the masses from an eagle’s perspective there is only a few here and there choosing the right direction and the masses that are headed south are too numerous to count.

From up here (yes, I’m soaring like an eagle) it looks as if God is separating the good and the evil putting them all in little Easter baskets. I think Ishtar (who Easter is derived from that everyone blindly celebrates thinking it a Christian holiday) would be very happy. 

From Wikipedia: "Woe to him whom Ishtar had honoured! The fickle goddess treated her passing lovers cruelly, and the unhappy wretches usually paid dearly for the favours heaped on them. Animals, enslaved by love, lost their native vigour: they fell into traps laid by men or were domesticated by them. 'Thou has loved the lion, mighty in strength', says the hero Gilgamesh to Ishtar, 'and thou hast dug for him seven and seven pits! Thou hast loved the steed, proud in battle, and destined him for the halter, the goad and the whip.'
Even for the gods, Ishtar's love was fatal. In her youth the goddess had loved Tammuz, god of the harvest, and—if one is to believe Gilgamesh —this love caused the death of Tammuz.”

My new year has begun (thank you, Mike, for remembering) and as usual, I have my blinders on. I don’t want to be a witness to the world collapsing all around me. I don’t want to see people that I trusted fall. I’m losing hope in the world and people in general. I always tried to see the good in people but blindly I’ve been led on and they’re just as wicked as the next person. I thought that Mardis Gras was in February, why are humans still embracing the masks?

I hold onto the tiny rays of light that do make it through to my world and is not the false pretense of the enormous amount of people who have headed south with their immoral compass. They know it’s wrong and if only they knew what truth and Light looked, tasted and smelled like, I believe the world could be a better place to live.

I think I’ll nestle up here on a branch, a Branch that was extended to the world but they were too caught up to see the beauty of it all. May God have mercy on our soul. 

Proverbs 11:18 (NIV) “The wicked man earns deceptive wages, but he who sows righteousness reaps a sure reward.”

Grain of Sand

Gen. 32: 12 And thou saidst, I will surely do thee good, and make thy seed as the sand of the sea, which cannot be numbered for multitude.

Grain of Sand

While some line up

On the bandwagon of sand

Rolling toward

the hearth to stand.

Warming hands

Beside the fire

All are mounting

The hearts desire.

Grain upon grain

I see the wad

Mounting up

Away from God.

Satan’s here

Always lurking

Finding ways

For evil working.

You jump in

Feet always first

You choose to see

In them their worst.

I praise the Lord

For the choice

To him be the Glory

Of my small voice.

While everyone looks

To the misguided flock.

I’ll stand upon

The Word, my Rock!

Matt. 7: 26 And every one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not, shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house upon the sand: