The deep places in our lives - places of resistance and embrace - are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.

We pray because our life comes from God and we yield it back in prayer. Prayer is a great antidote to the illusion that we are self-made.

The task of prophetic ministry is to nurture, nourish, and evoke a consciousness and perception alternative to the consciousness and perception of the dominant culture around us.

The gospel is fiction when judged by the empire, but the empire is fiction when judged by the gospel.

The power of the future lies not in the hands of those who believe in scarcity but of those who trust God's abundance.

The church meets to imagine what our lives can be like if the gospel were true.

The world for which you have been so carefully prepared is being taken away from you, by the grace of God.

Hope does not need to silence the rumblings of crisis to be hope.

On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

Sabbath is not simply the pause that refreshes. It is the pause that transforms.

We do not live by what is possessed but by what is promised.

Guilt is a feeling that you owe a debt that you're not paying.

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

The old echoes are long in dying.

We bring together the best ideas - turning the meetings of our top managers into intellectual orgies.

If your company disappeared, would it leave a gaping hole that could not easily be filled by any other enterprise on the planet?

How sad to see a father with money and no joy. The man studied economics, but never studied happiness.

I am terrible at memorizing things. Hence, ad-libbing.

Idleness leads to relaxation, sooner or later bringing about ideological and material corruption, accompanied by lack of discipline, anarchy chaos and defeat.

There's a lot of fantasy about what Scotland is, and the shortbread tins and that sort of thing.

As practice makes perfect, I cannot but make progress; each drawing one makes, each study one paints, is a step forward.