Unexpected Gifts Quotes

As life becomes harder and more threatening, it also becomes richer, because the fewer expectations we have, the more good things of life become unexpected gifts that we accept with gratitude. ~ Etty Hillesum

Life is always bringing unexpected gifts. ~ May Sarton

Tyler wrote:
Dearest Marguerite:
You've taught me a great deal about stillness. About the many things that can drift into your mind and heart when you shut down the barricades created by noise. Unexpected gifts of insight, revelation and wisdom. < ... >
But you taught me that love is found in stillness. It is the space between objects. It's the star you can't see if you look directly at it in the night sky, but if you look away, look forward, you see it in your peripheral vision, beside you, watching over you. If you lie down on the earth it's there, beneath you, cradling you.< ... >
You're my angel, my tormentor, my woman, my love.
God, Tyler is such a gentleman! He is gentle AND a gentleman. ~ Joey W. Hill

Unexpected gifts were better accepted when they were presented by total strangers, I had learnt. ~ Vann Chow

[on his satisfaction as an artist] In terms of cinema and filmmaking, there are certainly the unexpected gifts that the actors bestow on you. Film is always a question of compromises with respect to what you originally intended. ~ Michael Haneke

The key to a woman's heart is an unexpected gift at an unexpected time. ~ Sean Connery

There was one big rule in life - the things you worried about never happened, and the things that happened were never the ones you expected. Not that this bit of advice helped Johnny much. It simply meant that he spent more time guessing at what the unexpected disasters in his life would be. ~ John Bellairs

The struggles and the chaos are part of life. But you have to accept them with grace and serenity because they have their own gifts too. ~ Demi Lovato

Life is full of unexpected. May God grant us the grace, courage and hope to endure the unexpected circumstances. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

If someone told me that I could live my life again free of depression provided I was willing to give up the gifts depression has given me
the depth of awareness, the expanded consciousness, the increased sensitivity, the awareness of limitation, the tenderness of love, the meaning of friendship, the apreciation of life, the joy of a passionate heart
I would say, 'This is a Faustian bargain! Give me my depressions. Let the darkness descend. But do not take away the gifts that depression, with the help of some unseen hand, has dredged up from the deep ocean of my soul and strewn along the shores of my life. I can endure darkness if I must; but I cannot lie without these gifts. I cannot live without my soul.' (p. 188) ~ David Elkins

Let your gifts grow & glow to give life & light to others ~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world, which will shake off the domination of Europeans - still nominally Christian - and reappear as the prime enemy of our civilization? The future always comes as a surprise, but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam. ~ Hilaire Belloc

The unexpected success is an opportunity, but it makes demands. It demands to be taken seriously. It demands to be staffed with the ablest people available, rather than with whoever we can spare. It demands seriousness and support on the part of management equal to the size of the opportunity. And the opportunity is considerable. ~ Peter F. Drucker

What we moderns call "addictions" God calls "idols," and all of God's good gifts are meant to raise our eyes in thanksgiving to our benevolent heavenly Father, not to fix our eyes on the gifts themselves. ~ Michael S. Horton

The house built on the sand may oftentimes be built higher, have more fair parapets and battlements, windows and ornaments, than that which is built upon the rock; yet all gifts and privileges equal not one grace. ~ John Owen

Your purpose in life is to use your gifts and talents to help other people. Your journey in life teaches you how to do that. ~ Tom Krause

Faith does not cease being active as it undertakes the process of rigorous thinking. One need not disavow the gifts of intellect in giving thought to their Giver ~ Thomas C. Oden

Never worry about what others have; worry about what you have and refuse to use. Someone else will also worry about what you have when you begin to make use of it! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Pleasure to me is wonder - the unexplored, the unexpected, the thing that is hidden and the changeless thing that lurks behind superficial mutability. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

Getting up early is one of the gifts I give myself. ~ Robin S. Sharma

Above all else, know this: Be prepared at all times for the gifts of God and be ready always for new ones. For God is a thousand times more ready to give than we are to receive ~ Meister Eckhart

In the ashes on the hearth Saigyo traced and retraced the word, "pity." He had yet to learn to accept life with all its good and evils, to love life in all its manifestations by becoming one with nature. And for this he had abandoned home, wife, and child in that city of conflict. He had fled to save his own life, not for any grandiose dream of redeeming mankind; neither had he taken vows with the thoughts of chanting sutras to Buddha; nor did he aspire to brocaded ranks of the high prelates. Only by surrendering to nature could he best cherish his own life, learn how man should live, and therein find peace. And if any priest accused him of taking the vows out of self-love, not to purify the world and bring salvation to men, Saigyo was ready to admit that these charges were true and that he deserved to be reviled and spat upon as a false priest. Yet, if driven to answer for himself, he was prepared to declare that he who had not learned to love his own life could not love mankind, and that what he sought now was to love that life which was his. Gifts he had none to preach salvation or the precepts of Buddha; all that he asked was to be left to exist as humbly as the butterflies and the birds. ~ Eiji Yoshikawa

If you keep in secret what would have been used to help you, you will never be helped! Your gifts make way for you to lead; use them well! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

It is reported of the peacock that priding himself in his gay feathers he ruffles them up; but spying his black feet he soon lets fall his plumes. So he that glories in his gifts and adornings should look upon his corruptions, and that will damp his high thoughts. ~ Anne Bradstreet

Accordingly, we shall find angels and men to be dry, heaven to be empty, the earth to be unproductive, and, in short, all things to be of no value, if we wish to be partakers of the gifts of God in any other way than through Christ. ~ John Calvin

You have inside you the capacity to invest your mental, emotional, and spiritual gifts in a way that glorifies God, impacts the world, and satisfies your own soul. I believe that-and I want you to believe it, too. ~ David Jeremiah

As long as a woman is forced into believing she is powerless and/or is trained to not consciously register what she knows to be true, the feminine impulses and gifts of her psyche continue to be killed off. ~ Clarissa Pinkola Estes

That even within its ugliness, there lay a surprising beauty, breathtaking because it was so unexpected. ~ Justina Chen

Peering around her, I took note exactly where the hundred metre high cliff started. i didn't want to be taking an unexpected flying lesson today. ~ Kelly Batten

Don't be afraid of emptiness. Emptiness is divine. Let the divine fill up the space in a way that is truly right for you. Trying to fill it up too soon blocks your gifts. ~ Renae A. Sauter

The thing about love was that it caught you unawares, turned up in the most unexpected places, even when you weren't looking for it. ~ Sarra Manning

When we share in each other's grief and pain, we lighten it. Or maybe we just give each other permission to feel it fully and, through that act of acceptance, the grief becomes more bearable. Because, like the rain, tears too have an end. And with deep emotions, we are open to each other in unexpected ways. ~ Karpov Kinrade

You were created to give. You were created to make the lives of others better. Someone needs what you have. Someone needs your love. Someone needs your smile. Someone needs your encouragement and your gifts. ~ Joel Osteen

The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others - who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O'Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals with one's failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There's the glass you broke in anger, there's the hurt on X's face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commissions and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed, the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves. ~ Joan Didion

Most of what we got was crockery: from exotic crystal bowls to ceramic anomalies. Then, a cross-section of rugs- from a beautiful Kashmiri original to a memorable one with printed dragons and utterly incomprehensible hieroglyphics. Dibyendu (typically) gave us a scrabble set and Runai Maashi: that rocking chair. Yuppie work friends, trying to be unique and aesthetically offbeat, went for wind-chimes but there were really far too many of them by the end. We also got a fantastic number of white and off-white kurtas, jamdani sarees with complementary blouses, no less than nine suitcases, suit pieces, imported condoms, bed-sheets, bed-covers, coffee makers, coffee tables, coffee-table books, poetry books, used gifts (paintings of sunsets and other disasters), three nights and four days in Darjeeling, along with several variations of Durga, Ganesh and all the usual suspects in ivory, china, terracotta, papier-mâché, and what have you. Someone gave us a calendar that looking back, I think, was laudably sardonic. Others gave us money, in various denominations: from eleven to five hundred and one. And in one envelope, came a letter for her that she read in tears in the bathroom.'
('Left from Dhakeshwari') ~ Kunal Sen

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don't exist. ~ Adam Gopnik

All these things He must be in me, abiding, living, speaking in me; that I may be the righteousness of God in Him (2 Cor. v. 21); not in love, nor in gifts and graces which follow; but in Him. ~ Martin Luther

…They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. ~ Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

Our ministry is supported entirely by faith, through the missions gifts of readers who receive my messages every three weeks. We seldom mention money, and we never burden supporters. ~ David Wilkerson

No matter how many people celebrate your gifts, don't ever think that you are more important to them than your gift is to them. This is why many people fail: They fail because they think that people came to follow them. ~ Myles Munroe