John Powell Quotes

To live fully, we must learn to use things and love people, and not love things and use people.

Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

Love supposes, is, and does many things, but basically it is practiced in the act of sharing.

When we contact each other, we change each other. We are constantly making each other.

A life of love is difficult, but it is not a bleak or unrewarding life. In fact, it is the only true human and happy life, for it is filled with concerns that are as deep as life, as wide as the whole world, and as far reaching as eternity. It is only when we have consented to love, and have agreed to forget ourselves, that we can find our fulfillment. This fulfillment will come unperceived and mysterious like the grace of God, but we will recognize it and it will be recognized in us.

Loneliness is the prison of the human spirit. When we are lonely, we pace back and forth in small, shut-in worlds.

Honest, open communication is the only street that leads us into the real world ... We then begin to grow as never before. And once we are on this road, happiness cannot be far away.

God isn't calling us to a lonely, joyless existence with the promise of a delayed reward. God is calling us to live, to love and enjoy the challenge. God's formulas are roadmaps to freedom and peace. God is saying to us: "The only way to live is to be free. So save your heart for love and save your love for persons. Don't ever let any 'thing' own you. Don't let money or fame or power or the pursuit of pleasure put a ring in your nose and lead you around. Love persons and use things." And of course, this is the only way to live, to be free.

He who has no inclination to learn more will be very apt to think that he knows enough.

Love demands that I learn how to focus my attention on the needs of those I love.

I also see the world of religion. I see some of my brothers and sisters trying to be religious without being fully human. They seem a little rigid and narrow at times, wanting to be holy, but not human. They seem to be winning a place in heaven, without realizing or enjoying the beauty of earth. They keep the ten commandments, but their observances look so joyless. Such a world seems small and the air in that world is stale.

There is no fixed, true and real person inside of you or me, precisely because being a person necessarily implies becoming a person, being in process.

A good listener truly wants to know the speaker.

There's the whole myth about rocket science. It's really not that hard. It's not brain surgery.

I have to be honest in asking myself: Do I really want to know and do God's will? Or is it rather that I want God to do my will? Do I go to God with the assurance that I want only to know and do his will? Or do I rather first make my own plans and then insist that God make my dreams come true?

To tell you my thoughts is to locate myself in a category. To tell you about my feelings is to tell you about me.

There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won't feel any pain.

A person can grow only as much as his horizon allows.

I wanted to play music from the age of seven. I suddenly fell in love with it and that's what I was going to do, or to be involved with music. It was just speaking to me at a level that as a seven year old I suddenly realized the world was capable of supporting in my head a lot more than what I was understanding verbally and visually.

Growth is always a gradual process, a bridge slowly crossed and not a corner sharply turned.

We cannot "psychologize" the grace of God. God's actions are outside and above our human sciences.

You have a unique message to deliver, a unique song to sing, a unique act of love to bestow. This message, this song, and this act of love have been entrusted exclusively to the one and only you.

We must be trying to learn who we really are rather than trying to tell ourselves who we should be.

Communication works for those who work at it.

If you knew me in the past, please do not think that I am the same person that you are meeting today. I have experienced more of life, I have encountered new depths in those I love, I have suffered and prayed and I am different.

Pain is a teacher from whom we can learn much.

Why am I afraid to tell you who I am? I am afraid to tell you who I am, because, if I tell you who I am, you may not like who I am, and it's all that I have ...

Love is not a feeling to be felt, it's an action to be learned.

Let us consider the reason of the case. For nothing is law that is not reason.

When Marconi suggested the possibility of wireless transmission of sound (the radio),he was committed to a mental institution. But people like Lincoln, Edison, and Marconi were strongly motivated. So they didn't give up. They somehow knew that the only real failure is the one from which we learn nothing. They seemed to go on the assumption that there is no failure greater than the failure of not trying, and so they continued to try in the face of repeated failures.

Comparison is the death of true self-contentment.