William Sloane Coffin Quotes
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Faith handles the ultimate incongruities of life, humor handles the more immediate ones.
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I'm not OK, you're not OK-and that's OK.
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Love measures our stature: the more we love, the bigger we are.
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I'm delighted that the future is unsure. That's the way it should be.
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Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom.... Only love can create intimacy, and freedom too, for when all hearts are one, nothing else has to be one--neither clothes nor age; neither sex nor sexual preference; race nor mind-set.
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Christians have no business thinking that the good life consists mainly in not doing bad things. We have no business thinking that to do evil in this world you have to be a Bengal tiger, when, in fact, it is enough to be a tame tabby—a nice person but not a good one. In short, Pentecost makes it clear that nothing is so fatal to Christianity as indifference.
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The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. We can never really love anybody with whom we never laugh. Love is in the giver, not the gift.
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Hope is a state of mind independent of the state of the world. If your heart's full of hope, you can be persistent when you can't be optimistic. You can keep the faith despite the evidence, knowing that only in so doing has the evidence any chance of changing. So while I'm not optimistic, I'm always very hopeful.
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God knows it is emotionally satisfying to be righteous with that righteousness that nourishes itself on the blood of sinners. But God also knows that what is emotionally satisfying can be spiritually devastating.
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Hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.
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Only reverence can restrain violence - reverence for human life and the environment.
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The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.
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Isn't that what growing up is all about - learning to outlast despair?
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In life you can either follow your fears or be led by your values, by your passions.
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It's so much easier to beat your breast than to stick your neck out.
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I asked an 85 year old professor, 'What makes you cry?' He said, 'Whenever I see or hear the truth.'
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There is nothing anti-intellectual in the leap of faith, for faith is not believing without proof but trusting without reservation.
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The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love. We can never really love anybody with whom we never laugh. Love is in the giver, not the gift. He told me that once he forgot himself and opened up like a door with a loose latch and everything fell out and he tried for days to put it all back in the proper order, but he finally gave up and left if there in a pile and loved everything equally. thanks to a subscriber! -William Sloan Coffin.
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Socrates had it wrong; it is not the unexamined but finally the uncommitted life that is not worth living.
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Nuclear Weapons merit unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation
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To show compassion for an individual without showing concern for the structures of society that make him an object of compassion is to be sentimental rather than loving.
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A spiritual person tries less to be godly than to be deeply human.
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There are three kinds of patriots, two bad, one good. The bad ones are the uncritical lovers and the loveless critics. Good patriots carry on a lover's quarrel with their country, a reflection of God's lover's quarrel with all the world.
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Charity is only a waystation on the road to justice.
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I love the recklessness of faith. First you leap, and then you grow wings.
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What is faith? Faith is being grasped by the power of love.
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Christians have to listen to the world as well as to the Word - to science, to history, to what reason and our own experience tell us. We do not honor the higher truth we find in Christ by ignoring truths found elsewhere.
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To be avoided at all costs is the solace of opinion without the pain of thought.
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We are not loved because we are valued; we are valued because we are loved.
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Compassion and justice are companions, not choices.
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