The Wayside Pulpit provides messages of inspiration for those who pass by our door. These quotations have been chosen biweekly from the collected wisdom of the ages and reflect the diverse and life-affirming beliefs of our congregation.
Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.
—JALAL AD-DIN RUMI
And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.
—JOHN 8:32
To find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both.
—CARL SAGAN
If people looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently.
—BILL WATTERSON
Every answer asks a more beautiful question.
—E.E. CUMMINGS
Peace cannot be kept by force. It can only be achieved by understanding.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
I would love to live like a river flows, carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
—JOHN O’DONOHUE
Your innermost sense of self, of who you are, is inseparable from stillness.
—ECKHART TOLLE
A mind stretched to a new idea can never go back to its original dimensions.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, SR.
Let us forgive each other—only then will we live in peace.
—LEO TOLSTOY
Religion is more about loving dialogue than it is about right ideas.
—SAM KEEN
Forgiveness is choosing to love.
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
No tree has branches so foolish as to fight amongst themselves.
—OJIBWE
The place to improve the world is first in one’s own heart and head and hands.
—ROBERT M. PIRSIG
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
—JOHN KEATS
Our own life is the instrument with which we experiment with the truth.
—THICH NHAT HANH
Live, so you do not have to look back and say, “God, how I have wasted my life.”
—ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Go forth under the open sky and list to nature’s teachings.
—WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT
Worry does not empty tomorrow of its sorrow, but empties today of its strength.
—CORRIE TEN BOOM
Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Spring is a great “Yes” pulsing through all life.
—MARVIN S. HILES
If I could take one word with me into eternity, it would be “give.”
—STEPHEN POST
Every step of the journey is the journey.
Everything in the universe is connected; interdependence rules the cosmic order.
—TAISEN DESHIMARU
To love is to return to a home we never left, to remember who we are.
—SAM KEEN
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
—ALBERT CAMUS
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
—HENRY STANLEY HASKINS
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
—ALDOUS HUXLEY
Wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
In the attitude of silence the soul finds the path in a clearer light.
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
Religion is about what we love, not about what we think.
—PETER MORALES
Those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life.
—RACHEL CARSON
God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought.
—JOSEPH CAMPBELL
By ethical conduct toward all creatures, we enter into a spiritual relationship with the universe.
—ALBERT SCHWEITZER
If you do not see God in the next person you meet, you need look no further.
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
Love must be as much a light as a flame.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
It is in our lives and not in our words that our religion must be read.
—THOMAS JEFFERSON
Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.
—VICTOR HUGO
We build too many walls and not enough bridges.
—ISAAC NEWTON
We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
We find comfort among those who agree with us, growth among those who don’t.
—FRANK A. CLARK
My country is the world; my religion is to do good.
—THOMAS PAINE
We need not think alike to love alike.
—FRANCIS DAVID
We are best united not by mutual fear but by mutual hope.
—ADLAI E. STEVENSON
All events are blessings given to us to learn from.
—ELISABETH KÜBLER-ROSS
All that fear finally protects us from is the possibility of love.
—FORREST CHURCH
The true mystery of the world is the visible.
—OSCAR WILDE
Life’s most urgent question is: what are you doing for others?
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
The holiest of holidays are those kept in silence and apart, the secret anniversaries of the heart.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
In a dark time, the eye begins to see.
—THEODORE ROETHKE
Anything said about God is true not of God but of our concept of God.
—ANTHONY DE MELLO
There is a calmness to a life lived in gratitude, a quiet joy.
—RALPH H. BLUM
The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty, and truth.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Music is the way I speak to the silence of the universe.
—MARGA RICHTER
Do not walk through time without leaving worthy evidence of your passage.
—POPE JOHN XXIII
You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.
—C.S. LEWIS
If peace is the question, yes is the answer.
—MINDY AUDLIN
The sun and its light, the ocean and the wave, the singer and his song: Not one. Not two.
—ANTHONY DE MELLO
Life is what we make it. Always has been, always will be.
—GRANDMA MOSES
I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood.
—MARIE CURIE
Peace is not unity in similarity but unity in diversity.
—MIKHAIL GORBACHEV
We do not attract that which we want, but that which we are.
—JAMES ALLEN
We are a way for the Cosmos to know itself.
—CARL SAGAN
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to us as it is, infinite.
—WILLIAM BLAKE
Words help us to understand; experience allows us to know.
—NEALE DONALD WALSCH
Mitakuye Oyasin: We are all related.
—LAKOTA
Wonder rather than doubt is the root of all knowledge.
—ABRAHAM JOSHUA HESCHEL
Our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.
—THE DALAI LAMA
Judgment is the mind’s primary tool of separation.
—DIANE BURKE
Let us not look back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.
—JAMES THURBER
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
—THE DALAI LAMA
As is the human mind, so is the cosmic mind. As is the atom, so is the universe.
—THE UPANISHADS
At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.
—JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE
Let nothing come between you and the light.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Thanks are the highest form of thought, and gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.
—G.K. CHESTERTON
Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance, one soul.
—MARCUS AURELIUS
Every problem has in it the seeds of its own solution.
—NORMAN VINCENT PEALE
Embrace your suffering, and let it reveal to you the way to peace.
—THICH NHAT HANH
If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude.
—MAYA ANGELOU
We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.
—ANAÏS NIN
Justice is love operating at a distance.
—JOSEPH SITTLER
Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.
—HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.
—MARIANNE WILLIAMSON
What is essential is invisible to the eye.
—ANTOINE DE SAINT EXUPÉRY
We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
If the only prayer you ever say in your whole life is “thank you,” that would suffice.
—MEISTER ECKHART
The passion for truth is silenced by answers which have the weight of undisputed authority.
—PAUL TILLICH
I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe.
—R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
—ANNE FRANK
Never does nature say one thing and wisdom another.
—JUVENAL
Realize deeply that the present moment is all you ever have.
—ECKHART TOLLE
Before me peaceful
Behind me peaceful
Under me peaceful
Over me peaceful
All around me peaceful.
—NAVAJO
In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer.
—ALBERT CAMUS
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Out beyond the ideas of wrong-doing and right-doing, there is a field. I will meet you there.
—MEVLANA JELALLUDIN RUMI
We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation.
—MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I imagine that yes is the only living thing.
—E. E. CUMMINGS
Each night a child is born is a holy night.
—SOPHIA LYON FAHS
A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.
—WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR.
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Silence is sometimes the best answer.
—THE DALAI LAMA
Be the change you wish to see in the world.
—MOHANDAS GANDHI
Let the beauty of what you love be what you do.
—MEVLANA JELALLUDIN RUMI
Work is love made visible.
—KAHLIL GIBRAN
To know you have enough is to be rich.
—THE TAO TE CHING
Are we not formed, as notes of music are, for one another, though dissimilar?
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY
Come out of the circle of time and into the circle of love.
—MEVLANA JELALLUDIN RUMI
We are spiritual beings having a human experience.
—PIERRE TEILHARD DE CHARDIN
Only that day dawns to which we are awake.
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
Gardening is active participation in the deepest mysteries of the universe.
—THOMAS BERRY
What is the value of political freedom but as a means to moral freedom?
—HENRY DAVID THOREAU
The universe will reward you for taking risks on its behalf.
—SHAKTI GAWAIN
What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
—MARY OLIVER
Live out of your imagination, not your history.
—STEPHEN R. COVEY
There is no house like the house of belonging.
—DAVID WHYTE
Dare to live the life you have dreamed for yourself.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
Though I am different from you, we were born involved in one another.
—T’AO CHIEN
Who will speak for Planet Earth?
—CARL SAGAN
