"Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light."  --Helen Keller

"The refusal to act in the midst of injustice is itself an act of injustice. Indifference to oppression perpetuates oppression."  --Jemar Tisby, The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism

“The family is a haven in a heartless world.”  --Christopher Lasch

"There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world."  -- Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II

"Laws are the terms by which independent and isolated men united to form a society, once they tired of living in a perpetual state of war where the enjoyment of liberty was rendered useless by the uncertainty of its preservation. They sacrificed a portion of this liberty so that they could enjoy the remainder in security and peace."  --Cesare Beccaria

"Money and Corruption Are ruining the land Crooked politicians Betray the working man, Pocketing the profits And treating us like sheep, And we're tired of hearing promises That we know they'll never keep"  --Ray Davies

“Sometimes exhaustion is not a result of too much time spent on something, but of knowing that in its place, no time is spent on something else.”  ― Joyce Rachelle

"When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago."  --Friedrich Nietzsche

"Full many a storm on this gray head has beat; / And now, on my high station do I stand, / Like the tired watchman in his rocked tower, / Who looked for the hour of his release. / I'm sick of worldly broils, and fain would rest / With those who war no more. "  --Joanna Baillie's Ethwald

“It’s so overwhelming when you notice how the clock ticks; so many tiny pieces holding each other together just so it keeps going. We are like clocks, too! Always ticking to the tocks. When the pieces of our soul are torn away or broken – we can’t be sent to the mending shop, however. So how do we get better? Workable? Thoughts can be tiring, at times. Or maybe it’s the same time – who knows? The clock is broken. Meh.”  --Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“Ever felt tired? Like existentially tired? Where you lose the sense of identity, structures, language, reason, being and time. Where you can’t see a destination and you can’t find a return, where even when you return its not a return to yourself rather it is a turn to a realisation that you have lost yourself somewhere between ‘the you’ and ‘the self’ and this dichotomy of what you call ‘you’ cannot make you feel home anymore. You run and you keep running, not towards anything but away from everything; from people, from rules, from gods, from words, from love and from being you, for forever. So do you ever feel tired?”  --Huseyn Raza

“Somewhere along the way

I got tired

Tired of them

Tired of me

And tired of everything I have to carry on my shoulders.

Maybe it’s all I need right now

A place where I know no one

And no one knows my name

Somewhere so far away from

Their old faces,

All of their empty souls

And dusty places; 

Where I can reinvent myself all over again

They I’ve always wanted and loved to be ..”

― Samiha Totanji

“In whatever battle we're facing, we too often lose hope. And once we've lost hope we've not only lost the battle, we've lost everything else as well.”  ― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Current Position: Tired from the human race.”  --Deyth Banger

“Here I am I am tired I am tired of running of having to carry my life like it was a basket of eggs”  ― William Faulkner, Light in August

"I feel all thin, sort of stretched, if you know what I mean: like butter that has been scraped over too much bread. That can't be right. I need a change, or something."  [Bilbo]  --J. R. R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

“The earth grieves, and I grieve, and I am weary of the fight”  --Sherryl Jordan, Winter of Fire

“It takes so much energy to keep things at bay.”  --Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“I don’t care about self I want out / of my story.”  --Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes

“It wasn't merely fatigue. Although it continued to worry me how tired I was all the time. I had a strange sense of missing something, of being in the wrong place - no matter where I was.”   --Josh Lanyon, The Dark Tide

“I became good at pretending. I became so good that after a while the lines blurred between my truth and fiction. And sometimes, when I did a really good job of pretending, I even fooled myself.”  — Ruta Sepetys, Salt to the Sea

“If you could be anyone, would you choose to be yourself?”  — Naomi Shihab Nye, Habibi

“For the moment I am really very, very tired of everything - more than tired.”  — Friedrich Nietzsche, Selected Letters

“Yet now despair itself is mild,

Even as the winds and waters are;

I could lie down like a tired child,

And weep away the life of care

Which I have borne and yet must bear,

Till death like sleep might steal on me,

And I might feel in the warm air

My cheek grow cold, and hear the sea

Breathe o'er my dying brain its last monotony.”

— Percy Bysshe Shelley, Stanzas Written in Dejection Near Naples

 "Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time."  --Ruth Bader Ginsburg

"Real human grief means allowing the illusion of immortality to die in us. When those whom we love with an “endless love” die, something also has to die within us. If we do not allow this to happen, we will lose touch with reality, our lives will become increasingly artificial, and we will lose our human capacity for compassion."  --Henri Nouwen

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”  --C.S. Lewis

"To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment."  --Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Go where there is silence and say something."  --Amy Goodman

"Is aging a way to the darkness or a way to the light? It is not given to anyone to make a final judgment, since the answer can only be brought forth from the center of our being. No one can decide for anyone else how his or her aging shall or should be. It belongs to the greatness of men and women that the meaning of their existence escapes the power of calculations and predictions. Ultimately, it can only be discovered and affirmed in the freedom of the heart. There we are able to decide between segregation and unity, between desolation and hope, between loss of self and a new, re-creating vision. Everyone will age and die, but this knowledge has no inherent direction. It can be destructive as well as creative, oppressive as well as liberating."  --Henri Nouwen

"But in times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers."  --King T’Challa in Black Panther (2018)

"Do not be silent; there is no limit to the power that may be released through you."  --Howard Thurman, Deep Is the Hunger

"I know that the fact that I am always searching for God, always struggling to discover the fullness of Love, always yearning for the complete truth, tells me that I have already been given a taste of God, of Love, and of Truth. I can only look for something that I have, to some degree, already found. How can I search for beauty and truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart? It seems that all of us human beings have deep inner memories of the paradise that we have lost. Maybe the word innocence is better than the word paradise. We were innocent before we started feeling guilty; we were in the light before we entered into the darkness; we were at home before we started to search for a home. Deep in the recesses of our minds and hearts there lies hidden the treasure we seek. We know its preciousness, and we know that it holds the gift we most desire: a life stronger than death."  --Henri Nouwen     

"You must let suffering speak, if you want to hear the truth."  --Cornel West

"A German officer visited Picasso in his studio during WWII. There he saw Guernica and shocked at the modernist 'chaos' of the painting asked him, 'Did you do this?' Picasso calmly replied, 'No, you did this!'"  —Slavoj Zizek

"Do everything possible so that liberty is victorious over oppression, justice over injustice, love over hate."  -- Ignacio Ellacuria

"Each and every time you shift your limited perspective to a perspective of wholeness, you are raising the collective consciousness. Every time you heal or transform a stale limited belief, you are adding to the light of the collective consciousness. Every time."  —Peggy Black

"We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice. We are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself."  -- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

"You have more power within your being than you can ever imagine. Practice being at peace, and you will experience peace, no matter the external conditions ... Right now, the world needs your peace. We are rarely so urgent in our requests, but now is the time to be the change you wish to see in the world."   --Ann Albers

"No matter how dark the moment, love and hope are always possible."  --George Chakiris

"The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments."  —Michael Parenti

"Some people say they are afraid of death. Others say they are not. But most people are quite afraid of dying. The slow deterioration of mind and body, the pains of a growing cancer, the ravaging effects of AIDS, becoming a burden for your friends, losing control of your movements, being talked about or spoken to with half-truths, forgetting recent events and the names of visitors—all of that and much more is what we really fear. It’s not surprising that we sometimes say: “I hope it doesn’t last long. I hope I will die through a sudden heart attack and not after a long, painful illness."

"But, whatever we think or hope, the way we will die is unpredictable and our worries about it quite fruitless. Still we need to be prepared. Preparing ourselves for our deaths is the most important task of life, at least when we believe that death is not the total dissolution of our identity but the way to its fullest revelation."  --Henri Nouwen

"May your hands be an extension of your heart and may you do the work of love with them."  -- Aja Monet

"War is manufactured by political leaders, who then must make a tremendous effort—by enticement, by propaganda, by coercion—to mobilize a normally reluctant population to go to war."  --Howard Zinn

 "There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to the church as a human being."  --James Joyce

"As long as national security is our primary concern and national survival more important than preserving life on this planet, we continue to live in the house of fear. Ultimately, we must choose between security—individual, social, or national— and freedom.

"Freedom is the true human goal. Life is only true if it is free. An obsessive concern for security freezes us; it leads us to rigidity, fixation, and eventually death. The more preoccupied we are with security the more visible the force of death becomes, whether in the form of a pistol beside our bed, a rifle in our house, or a Trident submarine in our port. . . .

"We must find a way to go beyond our national security obsession and reach out and foster life for all people, whatever their nationality, race, or religion."  --Henri Nouwen

"If now isn’t a good time for the truth, I don’t see when we’ll get to it."  --Nikki Giovanni

"Life itself likewise always turns towards one an infinitely meaningless, discouraging, dispiriting blank side on which there is nothing, any more than on a blank canvas. But however meaningless and vain, however dead life appears, the man of faith, of energy, of warmth, and who knows something, doesn’t let himself be fobbed off like that. He steps in and does something, and hangs on to that ..."  --Vincent van Gogh

"Walk with the wind, brothers and sisters, and let the spirit of peace and the power of everlasting love be your guide."  --John Lewis

"We see these natural tragedies, which are the Earth’s response to our maltreatment. […] It is we who have ruined the work of God."  --Pope Francis

"Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with [people] of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world."  -- Dom Hélder Câmara

"Walk carefully, well loved one,

walk mindfully, well loved one,

walk fearlessly, well loved one.

Return with us,

return to us,

be always coming home."

—Ursula K. LeGuin

"We don’t have the right to demand perfection from each other. But we do have the right to expect progress. To demand evolution. So, let’s make some new mistakes."  --Naomi Klein

"There will be no Peace if there is no Justice.

There will be no Justice if there is no Equity.

There will be no Equity if there is no Progress.

There will be no Progress if there is no Democracy.

There will be no Democracy if there is no Respect

For the Identity and Dignity of the Peoples and Cultures"

—Rigoberta Menchu

"This country was created from stolen land and stolen labor. And from a moral perspective, but also from a practical one, everybody knows that when you steal, you're always looking over your shoulder because you know that somebody may steal it back."  --Alicia Garza

"But we do not merely protest; we make renewed demand for freedom in that vast kingdom of the human spirit where freedom has ever had the right to dwell: the expressing of thought to unstuffed ears; the dreaming of dreams by untwisted souls."  -- W.E.B. DuBois

"The beauty of darkness is how it lets you see."  —Adrienne Rich

"I was in darkness, but I took three steps and found myself in paradise. The first step was a good thought, the second, a good word; and the third, a good deed."  —Friedrich Nietzsche

The Illusion of Immortality

"Much violence in our society is based on the illusion of immortality, which is the illusion that life is a property to be defended and not a gift to be shared. When the elderly no longer can bring us in contact with our own aging, we quickly start playing dangerous power games to uphold the illusion of being ageless and immortal. Then, not only will the wisdom of the elderly remain hidden from us, but the elderly themselves will lose their own deepest understanding of life. For who can remain a teacher when there are no students willing to learn?"  --Henri Nouwen

"This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which had never been seen before. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge but the ability to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down."  —Hannah Arendt

"Leave the door open for the unknown, the door into the dark. That’s where the most important things come from, where you yourself came from, and where you will go. Three years ago I was giving a workshop in the Rockies. A student came in bearing a quote from what she said was the pre-Socratic philosopher Meno. It read, “How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?” I copied it down, and it has stayed with me since ... The question she carried struck me as the basic tactical question in life. The things we want are transformative, and we don’t know or only think we know what is on the other side of that transformation. Love, wisdom, grace, inspiration — how do you go about finding these things that are in some ways about extending the boundaries of the self into unknown territory, about becoming someone else?"  --Rebecca Solnit

“Does what goes on inside show on the outside? Someone has a great fire in his soul and nobody ever comes to warm themselves at it, and passers-by see nothing but a little smoke at the top of the chimney.”  Vincent Van Gogh

"After months of inward darkness, I suddenly had the everlasting conviction that any human being, even though practically devoid of natural faculties, can penetrate to the kingdom of truth reserved for genius, if only he longs for truth and perpetually concentrates all his attention upon its attainment. He thus becomes a genius too, even though for lack of talent his genius cannot be visible from outside…

"Under the name of truth I also included beauty, virtue, and every kind of goodness, so that for me it was a question of a conception of the relationship between grace and desire. The conviction that had come to me was that when one hungers for bread one does not receive stones."  

--Simone Weil

"Alpinism is the art of climbing mountains by confronting the greatest dangers with the greatest prudence ... Art is used here to mean the accomplishment of knowledge in action."  --René Daumal

"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of [another] ... There are just some kind of men who — who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."  -- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

"Unfortunately, as a society, we do not teach our children that they need to tend carefully the garden of their minds. Without structure, censorship, or discipline, our thoughts run rampant on automatic. Because we have not learned how to more carefully manage what goes on inside our brains, we remain vulnerable to not only what other people think about us, but also to advertising and/or political manipulation."  —Jill Bolte Taylor

“In the Catholic tradition, there is a form of grace, the sanctifying one, that is the stuff of your soul. It is not defined by moments of mercy or opportunity; it is not good things happening to you. Rather, it is the good thing that is in you, regardless of what happens.”  --Imani Perry

"Responsibility to yourself means refusing to let others do your thinking, talking, and naming for you; it means learning to respect and use your own brains and instincts; hence, grappling with hard work."  -- Adrienne Rich

"The problem is to work toward awakening. That is the most important. Then everything will follow. If you are not awake, you cannot do anything. The problem is not the one force opposing another force to gain ground on this earth. The problem is awakening—opposing forgetfulness—which is the fruit of many sins, many crimes. People who kill people, who commit crimes, do so not necessarily because they are cruel or evil by nature, but because they forget. They are not conscious of what is going on around them and even inside themselves. Violence destroys consciousness."  —Thich Nhat Hahn

"Wherever you are, whatever platform you have, whatever sphere of influence you enjoy, the time is now for all of us to do something. The time is now to use our bodies to protect the bodies of those who are unsafe. The time is now to use our influence, to take a stand, to become active, to go to places to demand justice, and to disruptively remove ourselves from places. The time is now to raise our voices to be heard and to call on our nation to recognize the effects of racism in our criminal justice system and to reimagine public safety in this country."  -- Rev. Terrance M. McKinley 

"If it is true that solitude diverts us from our fear and anger and makes us empty for a relationship with God, then it is also true that our emptiness provides a very large and sacred space where we can welcome all the people of the world. There is a powerful connection between our emptiness and our ability to welcome. When we give up what sets us apart from others— not just property but also opinions, prejudices, judgments, and mental preoccupations—then we have room within to welcome friends as well as enemies."  --Henri Nouwen

"I don't have to agree with everything you say, but I should attempt at least to understand it, for the opposite of mutual understanding is, quite simply, war."  —Ken Wilber

"Those you have deeply loved become part of you. The longer you live, there will always be more people to be loved by you and to become part of your inner community. The wider your inner community becomes, the more easily you will recognize your own brothers and sisters in the strangers around you. . . . The wider the community of your heart, the wider the community around you."  --Henri Nouwen