Sufferer And The Witness Quotes

Father Alexander Schmemann is an Orthodox scholar who wrote a book called For the Life of the World. He says the liturgy is a journey that proceeds from the kingdom of this world into a brief encounter with the kingdom of God, and then back out again to bear witness to it. ~ Ian Morgan Cron

I think we lost Wiley. Somehow he was in a hit-and-run accident about two hours after you and I left. He was driving a car and he hit a bicycle. He was full of champagne, no doubt. A witness described him perfectly. She was shown Helmut Klopp's sketch and made a positive ID. It's all right there in the traffic division's log." "So your guy missed him coming out." "At one point he was talking to a traffic cop. It might have happened then." "But either way you don't know where Wiley is." "Not with an acceptable degree of certainty." "Is that something they teach you to say?" "It sounds sober and mature, and burdened down with technicalities." Reacher ~ Lee Child

Again, folks, you've been witness to one of the most seldom seen events in history ... I'm Chicken Larson saying good night, sleep tight and don't let the boogie man or a suicide blonde getchya. ~ Jenn Cooksey

Take more selfies. Not because you need validation or likes or comments. but because you are here on this earth. Alive and holy and true. And yes, your beauty deserves to be seen and known, most especially by you. You are worthy of being the subject of your own art. It is okay to capture the process of your own becoming. To be your own kind and gentle and fierce witness. To learn the truth of your eyes and your skin and your bones. To choose to show what wants to be shown, to name what wishes to be named, to claim ownership of the story that is told about you by being the one to tell it.

Dear girl. YOU are the greatest art you will ever create. The masterpiece. The magnum opus. You're it. However you want to be.

Look at yourself now, miracle that you are, look at yourself and soak in the wonder, until you no longer want to look away. ~ Jeanette LeBlanc

If our current barbaric world spirals into greater corruption and brutality, our descendants may become so cruel and so morally perverse that they cross time to watch us suffer, bearing orgasmic witness to the bloodbaths from which their sick civilization grew. ~ Dean Koontz

Leon Wells told of Operation 1005, the group of Jewish prisoners assigned to eradicate the evidence by opening mass graves and exhuming, burning, and pulverizing the bodies.

-- The Eichmann Trial, page 87 ~ Deborah E. Lipstadt

Much is being missed because of fear. We are too attached to the body and we go on creating more and more fear because of that attachment. The body is going to die, the body is part of death, the body is death - but you are beyond the body. You are not the body; you are the bodiless. Remember it. Realize it. Awaken yourself to this truth - that you are beyond the body. You are the witness, the seer. ~ Rajneesh

Evangelization does not consist in proselytizing, for proselytizing is a caricature of evangelization, but rather evangelizing entails attracting by our witness those who are far off, it means humbly drawing near to those who feel distant from God in the Church, drawing near to those who feel judged and condemned outright by those who consider themselves to be perfect and pure. ~ Pope Francis

No matter how many times I witness the miracle of someone having their sight restored, I'm still overwhelmed with emotion. When the eye patch comes off just 24 hours after surgery and you see that smile light up the room, you are witnessing a life being transformed. ~ Gabi Hollows

He took an unassuming pleasure in his possessions, and the likely prospect of becoming truly wealthy left him completely indifferent. He was, besides, one of those men who like to witness their own life, considering any ambition to live it inappropriate.

It should be noted that these men observe their fate the way most men are accustomed to observe a rainy day. ~ Alessandro Baricco

This, then, is the doctrine of the resurrection. We do not believe
at least I do not
that law has been rudely violated in one extraordinary and unparalleled episode. We believe that a universal law of life, overmastering death, and always superior to it, has had once a visible witness. ~ Charles Spurgeon

There remains a degree of anti-black intellectualism in entertainment. Middle and upper-middle class blacks have often been portrayed as buffoons in popular culture; witness the characters of Carlton Banks on 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' and Braxton P. Hartnabrig on 'The Jamie Foxx Show.' ~ John Ridley

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one. ~ James Russell Lowell

There was plenty of suffering for us to get through. Therefore, it was necessary to face up to the full amount of suffering, trying to keep moments of weakness and furtive tears to a minimum. But there was no need to be ashamed of tears, for tears bore witness that a man had the greatest of courage, the courage to suffer. Only very few realized that. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Customers have a first moment when they discover your brand. If you were to look at it today with a fresh pair of eyes, in fact only through a pair of fresh customer eyes and witness your brand for the very first time, what would you see? What impression would make? Or fail to make? Would your brand blend in? Would it stand out? Would it be memorable, or the leading cause of amnesia amongst shoppers everywhere? Facing the truth of this and fixing it as needed will determine whether your brand thrives or merely stumbles along. ~ David Brier

Jason (Elam, a Christian) is the kid in high school who gets along equally well with the jocks, the brains, the geeks, and the slackers, and influences their behavior. ~ Stefan Fatsis

The shade of the sky changed ever so slightly in her peripheral vision. She raised her eyes from her toes to the horizon, to witness the sun's last dance in the daylight as it began to descend slowly, magically into the distant sea. Exotic pastel hues of orange and fuchsia were now painted across the fading expression of the day. It was a calm yet isolating vision to take into her heart, for it made her feel exceedingly small in the grand scheme of things. ~ Kim Cormack

Slavery provides comfort to the oppressor. Even more than comfort, it provides power over those who witness. Slavery is, after all, a luxury. Slavery is a distraction, so long as the onlooker is not the victim. Slavery is cheap labor, an outlet for aggression, and, so we've learned over the years, a meaningless object to fulfill sexual desires. ~ D'Andre Lampkin

The room was a machine that measured my condition: how much of me remained, how much of me was no longer there. I was both perpetrator and witness, both actor and audience in a theater of one. I could follow the progress of my own dismemberment. Piece by piece, I could watch myself dissapear. ~ Paul Auster

Art is that which comes to a man, and stands between himself and an implacable witness: the work. ~ Eduardo Chillida

Sometimes it's interesting to see something that you're not used to seeing, which is the main ingredient of life, and it's removed from the usual entertainment. I think it's important to give the opportunity to people to witness the life of somebody who was not public. ~ Michel Gondry

this is the monumental error of counterinsurgency: despite its success absorbing the asymmetry introduced by guerilla tactics, it still continues to produce the figure of the "terrorist" based on what it is itself. And this is to our advantage, then, provided we don't allow ourselves to embody that figure. It's what all effective revolutionary strategy must accept as its point of departure. The failure of the American strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan bears witness. Counterinsurgency did such a good job of turning "the population" around that the Obama administration has to routinely and surgically assassinate, via drone, anything that might resemble an insurgent ~ Anonymous

And as to this little thing [his book], when it has been read it will be seen that during the fifteen years I have given to the study of statecraft I have neither slept nor idled; and men ought ever to desire to be served by one who has reaped experience at the expense of others. And of my loyalty none could doubt, because having always kept faith I could not now learn how to break it; for he who has been faithful and honest, as I have, cannot change his nature; and my poverty is a witness to my honesty. ~ Niccolo Machiavelli

This situation nailed why reality TV was such a hit. The human appetite to witness tragedy, to observe the subtle difference between pain and anguish, to see each emotion twist the features of a normally smiling face, was irresistible. It wasn't their fault. A certain amount of morbidity was innate in each of us, part of our biological makeup, our DNA. ~ Darynda Jones

But the appeal to antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that voice to be Divine. How can we know what antiquity was except through the Church? ... I may say in strict truth that the Church has no antiquity. It rests upon its own supernatural and perpetual consciousness ... The only Divine evidence to us of what was primitive is the witness and voice of the Church at this hour. ~ Henry Edward Manning

Gentlemen," the king called out, "and ladies, First Meal is getting cold."
Which was the cue for everyone to head back to the dining room and actually eat what had been only studiously ignored up until now.
With Payne safe and at home, appetites were free to roam once more . . . although as God was his witness he was not going to think about what the hell that surgeon and his sister were no doubt about to get into.
As he groaned, Jane tightened her arm around his waist. "Are you all right?"
He glanced down at his shellan. "I don't think my sister is old enough to have sex."
"V, she's the same age you are."
He frowned for a moment. Was she? Or had he been born first?
Yeah, only one place to go for the answer to that. Shit, he hadn't even thought of his mother in all this. And now that he was . . . he had absolutely no desire or interest to pop up there and announce that Payne was doing great, fuck you very much.
Nope. If the Scribe Virgin wanted to keep tabs on what her "children" were up to? She could look into those fakakta seeing bowls she liked so much.
He kissed his shellan. "I don't care what the calendar says or about the birth order. That's my baby sister, and she's never going to be old enough to . . . 'um, yeah.' "
Jane laughed and retucked herself under his arm. "You are a very sweet male."
"Nah."
"Yeah."
Leading her into the dining room and over to the table, he gallantly pulled her chair ~ J.R. Ward

Peace comes by knowing you're dearly loved by the Lord, Who gives to His children the Holy Spirit to dwell within, to make their witness strong, so that one day they will be as a tree, fruitful and blessed with the wisdom of the forest. ~ Calvin W. Allison

We are called to witness, always with our lives and sometimes with our words, to the great things God has done for us. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

I must speak the truth, even at the risk of being ostracized by my fellow scribblers. In fact, anticipating their rage, I have already applied for a place in the Canada Council's witness-protection program. This because, much as it pains me to turn on my kind, I fear the time has come to admit that far too many celebrated writers were outrageous liars, philanderers, drunks, druggies, unsuitable babysitters, plagiarists, psychopaths, parasites, cowards, indifferent dads or moms and bad credit risks. ~ Mordecai Richler

The young people I teach now know they are being sold down the river before we even start studying the trends and numbers. That's the toughest part of being a high school economics teacher ... being a witness when our children realize that the greatest deficit of all is a deficit of leadership. ~ Kurt Bills

The cause of laziness is physiological; it is an infirmity of the constitution, and its victim is as much to be pitied as a sufferer from any other constitutional infirmity. It is even worse than many other diseases; from them the patient may recover, while this is incurable. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

Narrative horror, disgust. That's what drives him mad, I'm sure of it, what obsesses him. I've known other people with the same aversion, or awareness, and they weren't even famous, fame is not a deciding factor, there are many individuals who experience their life as if it were the material of some detailed report, and they inhabit that life pending its hypothetical or future plot. They don't give it much thought, it's just a way of experiencing things, companionable, in a way, as if there were always spectators or permanent witnesses, even of their most trivial goings-on and in the dullest of times. Perhaps it's a substitute for the old idea of the omnipresence of God, who saw every second of each of our lives, it was very flattering in a way, very comforting despite the implicit threat and punishment, and three or four generations aren't enough for Man to accept that his gruelling existence goes on without anyone ever observing or watching it, without anyone judging it or disapproving of it. And in truth there is always someone: a listener, a reader, a spectator, a witness, who can also double up as simultaneous narrator and actor: the individuals tell their stories to themselves, to each his own, they are the ones who peer in and look at and notice things on a daily basis, from the outside in a way; or, rather, from a false outside, from a generalised narcissism, sometimes known as "consciousness". That's why so few people can withstand mockery, humiliation, ridicule, the ~ Javier Marias

We must open our eyes to admire God who hides and at the same time reveals himself in things and introduces us into the realms of mystery ... we must be pure and simple like children, capable of admiring, being astonished, of marveling, and being enchanted by the divine gestures of love and closeness we witness. ~ Pope John Paul II

Sunset is a moment where we can wait for all day long to witness it! And not only for one day, but we can wait for all the days of all the years! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

He acted every part of an orator, and I could observe many periods of threatenings, and others of promises, pity, and kindness. I answered in a few words, but in the most submissive manner, lifting up my left hand, and both my eyes to the sun, as calling him for a witness; and being almost famished with hunger, having not eaten a morsel for some hours before I left the ship, I found the demands of nature so strong upon me, that I could not forbear showing my impatience (perhaps against the strict rules of decency) by putting my finger frequently to my mouth, to signify that I wanted food. The hurgo ~ Jonathan Swift

I answered that as a neurologist and a psychiatrist, of course, I am fully aware of the extent to which man is not at all free from conditions. But I added that along with being a professor in two fields (neurology and psychiatry) I am a survivor of four camps (that is, concentration camps), and as such I also bear witness to the unexpected extent to which man is, and always remains, capable of resisting and braving even the worst conditions. To detach oneself from even the worst conditions is a uniquely human capability. [...] By virtue of this capacity man is capable of detaching himself not only from a situation but also from himself. He is capable of choosing his attitude toward himself. By doing so he really takes a stand toward his own somatic and psychic conditions and determinants. Understandably this is a crucial issue for psychotherapy and psychiatry, education and religion. For, seen in this light, a person is free to shape his own character, and man is responsible for what he may have made out of himself. ~ Viktor E. Frankl