Prophetic Pragmatism Quotes

Music is no longer tasted it is swallowed. ~ Jules Verne

Prophetic pragmatism attempts to keep alive the sense of alternative ways of life and of struggle based on the best of the past. In this sense, the praxis of prophetic pragmatism is tragic action with revolutionary intent, usually reformist consequences and always visionary outlook. ~ Cornel West

I am capable of all the passions, for I bear them all within me. Like a tamer of wild beasts, I keep them caged and lassoed, but I sometimes hear them growling. I have stifled more than one nascent love. Why? Because with that prophetic certainty which belongs to moral intuition, I felt it lacking in true life, and less durable than myself. I choked it down in the name of the supreme affection to come. The loves of sense, of imagination, of sentiment, I have seen through and rejected them all; I sought the love which springs from the central profundities of being. And I still believe in it. I will have none of those passions of straw which dazzle, burn up, and wither; I invoke, I await, and I hope for the love which is great, pure and earnest, which lives and works in all the fibers and through all the powers of the soul. And even if I go lonely to the end, I would rather my hope and my dream died with me, than that my soul should content itself with any meaner union. ~ Henri-Frédéric Amiel

The prophetic spirit is transferable and can be imparted. ~ John Eckhardt

Justice Sandra Day O'Connor brought critical qualities to the high court that not everybody thinks are qualities - I happen to think they are - her pragmatism and her state craft. ~ Joe Biden

No matter what the cause, even though it be to conquer with tanks and planes and modern artillery some defenseless black population, there will be no lack of poets and preachers and essayists and philosophers to invent the necessary reasons and gild the infamy with righteousness. To this righteousness there is, of course, never an adequate reply. Thus a war to end poverty becomes an unanswerable enterprise. For who can decently be for poverty? To even debate whether the war will end poverty becomes an exhibition of ugly pragmatism and the sign of an ignoble mind. ~ John T. Flynn

The Jew - is the symbol of eternity. ... He is the one who for so long had guarded the prophetic message and transmitted it to all mankind. A people such as this can never disappear. The Jew is eternal. He is the embodiment of eternity. ~ Leo Tolstoy

Americans will not and should not respond to a political creed that cherishes the past solely because it offers an excuse for shutting out the hard facts and difficult tasks of the present. ~ Nelson Rockefeller

Witta feared nothing - except to be poor. ~ Rudyard Kipling

We in our age are faced with a strange paradox. Never before have we had so much information in bits and pieces flooded upon us by radio and television and satellite, yet never before have we had so little inner certainty about our own being. The more objective truth increases, the more our inner certitude decreases. Our fantastically increased technical power, and each forward step in technology is experienced by many as a new push toward our possible annihilation. Nietzsche was strangely prophetic when he said,

"We live in a period of atomic chaos…the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether."

Sensing this, and despairing of ever finding meaning in life, people these days seize on the many ways of dulling their awareness by apathy, by psychic numbing, or by hedonism. Others, especially young people, elect in alarming and increasing numbers to escape their own being by suicide. ~ Rollo May

We desperately need seers who can see through the mist- Christian leaders with prophetic vision. Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation. And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy. ~ Aiden Wilson Tozer

How many were there of these homely visionaries, prophetic pythonesses, sententious prophetesses, raving old women, swooning damsels, talking crickets, these convulsionaries haunted by incubi, who 'dropped down dead with epilepsy,' how many the matrons desirous of regeneration, and the old women seeking 'purgation?' How many the 'fountains of deceit,' the 'amphitheaters of monstrosities,' how many have tumbled into the 'cavern of nothingness.' Collective infatuation, 'epidemics of the imagination,' 'filthy dreams' born of 'obscene' and delirious 'fantasy,' 'nocturnal flights through the air,' 'brutal releases of pent-up lust' by "melancholic women, endowed with vigorous imaginations and ferocious animals spirits, or indeed old women consumed by all manner of filthy and libidinous desires, which they abet with generous quantities of liquor: no wonder, then, that when asleep they are prey to such nefarious deliriums ~ Piero Camporesi

In politics, Joseph Smith was something of a radical. He preached, instead of democracy, a version of theocratic rule within a framework given by his own prophetic leadership. At Nauvoo, Smith affected a Napoleonic uniform and made himself into a general and quasi king of the polity he had constituted. ~ Noah Feldman

The people with the best sense of what is essential to a community, of what gives and maintains its spirit, are often doing very humble, manual tasks. It is often the poorest person - the one who has a handica[p, is] ill or old - who is the most prophetic. People who carry responsibility must be close to them and know what they think, because it is often they who are free enough to see with the greatest clarity the needs, beauty and pain of the community. ~ Jean Vanier

By 'scientifiction' I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story-a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision ~ Hugo Gernsback

Thought's a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night? ~ Graham Greene

Idealism without pragmatism is impotent. Pragmatism without idealism is meaningless. The key to effective leadership is pragmatic idealism. ~ Richard M. Nixon

The best art looks and sounds prophetic; a genius borrows from tomorrow what he uses today. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

Pragmatism , in trying to turn experimental physics into a prototype of all science and to model all spheres of intellectual life after the techniques of the laboratory, is the counterpart of modern industrialism, for which the factory is the prototype of human existence, and which models all branches of culture after production on the conveyor belt. ~ Max Horkheimer

I'm thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art, And this is the only immortality that you and I may share, my Lolita. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Poetry reveals to us the loveliness of nature, brings back the freshness of youthful feelings, reviews the relish of simple pleasures, keeps unquenched the enthusiasm which warmed the springtime of our being, refines youthful love, strengthens our interest in human nature, by vivid delineations of its tenderest and softest feelings, and through the brightness of its prophetic visions, helps faith to lay hold on the future life. ~ William Ellery Channing

Most, I loved James Baldwin's essays. There was to a Baldwin essay a metropolitan elegance I envied, a refusal of the livid. In Baldwin I found a readiness to rise to prophetic wrath, something like those ministers, and yet, once more, to bend down in tenderness, to call grown men and women "baby" (a whiff of the theater). Watching Baldwin on television - I will always consider the fifties to have been a sophisticated time - fixed for me what being a writer must mean. Arching eyebrows intercepted ironies, parenthetically declared fouls; mouthfuls of cigarette smoke shot forth ribbons of exactitude. ~ Richard Rodriguez

Obedience is the thing, living in active response to the living God. The most important question we ask of this text is not, 'What does this mean?' but 'What can I obey?' A simple act of obedience will open up our lives to this text far more quickly than any number of Bible studies and dictionaries and concordances. ~ Eugene H. Peterson

The author's projected intellectual climate nearly 500 years in the future proclaims itself too pragmatic to consider living well as important as material satisfaction. This reminds us, ironically, that choosing NOT to consider life's deeper questions is in itself a choice with profound and lasting consequences. ~ Bryan M. Litfin

Thus I suggest that prophetic ministry has to do not primarily with addressing specific public crises but with addressing, in season and out of season, the dominant crisis that is enduring and resilient, of having our alternative vocation co-opted and domesticated. ~ Walter Brueggemann

A matter of pragmatism; chemically knocking someone senseless is usually quieter, less messy and less risky to the assailant than killing them. ~ Greg Egan

The perception of the West as mostly a "knight of democracy" has been replaced with the disappointed belief that pragmatism, often cynical and selfish, lies at the core of Western policies. For many Russians it was a grave disillusion, a crushing of ideals. ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

KODO SAWAKI ~ To practice the buddha way is not to let our minds wander but to become one with what we're doing. This is called zanmai (or samadhi) and shikan (or "just doing"). Eating rice isn't preparation for shitting; shitting isn't preparation for making manure. And yet these days people think that high school is preparation for college and college is preparation for a good job. ~ Kosho Uchiyama

And I know that this is prophetic: that God is going to send this mighty wave - I want everyone here to prophecy with me in Lakeland - that this mighty wave is going all the way out to California, Highway 40, coast to coast aaaaah! and we want to release that mighty Holy Ghost in. Send it all over the world. The wave is moving. The wave is moving the wave is. Come on! Catch the wave. Catch the wave in Canada. Catch it in Canada. Catch it in Australia. Catch it in England. Catch it in Asia. Catch it in Europe. Catch it all over the world. ~ Todd Bentley

Analogies can easily be multiplied, if one wants to push a thesis; but the point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making 'laws' beyond its competence. Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about 'Holy Mother the State,' or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the kingdom of God. ~ Francis George

I thank you, dear Brothers, for preaching the love of Christ and exhorting your people to tolerance, respect and love of their brothers and sisters and of all persons. In this way you exercise the prophetic ministry that the Lord has entrusted to the Church, and in particular to the Successors of the Apostles (cf. Pastores Gregis, 26). ~ Pope Benedict XVI

I have always thought a person needs to constantly refine the capacity to suspend disbelief in order to keep emotions organized and not suffer debilitating confusion, and I mean just toward the things of daily life. I suppose this admits to a desperate sort of pragmatism. Still, it works for me. What human heart isn't in extremis? ~ Howard Norman

But the cruelest habit the modern prophecy-savans have, is that one of coolly and arbitrarily fitting the prophetic shirt on to the wrong man. They do it without regard to rhyme or reason. ~ Mark Twain

When you say that [Martin Luther] King was a prophet, you don't say that he predicted anything; you say that he bore witness. He left a committed life so that people would never forget the suffering of people that he was connected to. King was prophetic because he lived a committed life. Now he did critique society, saying you're going to go under if you don't treat your poor right. I mean, that is part of prophetic calling, but it's not predicting anything. ~ Cornel West