Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Wisdom is not gained by knowing what is right. Wisdom is gained by practicing what is right, and noticing what happens when that practice succeeds and when it fails.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Barbara Brown Taylor
Age: 73
Born: 1951
Born: September 21
Anglican Priest
Priest
Fails
Succeed
Failing
Wisdom
Knowing
Succeeds
Practice
Noticing
Happens
Practicing
Right
Gained
More quotes by Barbara Brown Taylor
Every human interaction offers you the chance to make things better or to make things worse.
Barbara Brown Taylor
It can be difficult to be an introvert in church, especially if you happen to be the pastor. Liking to be alone can be interpreted as a judgment on other people's company. Liking to be quiet can be construed as aloofness. There is so much emphasis on community in most congregations that anyone who does not participate risks being labeled a loner.
Barbara Brown Taylor
You can create an intimate community of about 20 or 25 people, and beyond that you're into a different kind of relationship.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I didn't want to be a priest. I wanted to do the work that priests do, and that required becoming a priest.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I'm in a mainline church, I'm very aware, especially as I move through community churches and new-start churches that are making real efforts not to associate themselves with traditional denominations - very often they have no history. They have no institutional memory.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Having been brought up with a definition of faith as adherence to a set of beliefs, I have more and more begun to turn instead toward a definition of faith as openness to truth, whatever truth may turn out to be.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Most of us will have more than one job in our working lives, which means we will have more than one opportunity to seek meaningful work at different stages of our own deepening humanity.
Barbara Brown Taylor
Most of us like thinking we are God's only children...At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I thought being faithful was about becoming someone other than who I was...it wasn't until I failed that I began to wonder if my human wholeness might be more useful to God than my exhausting goodness.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The boundaries became constrictive in what I was doing, and if my faith grew, it was because I pressed some of the boundaries in ways I hadn't felt comfortable or responsible doing that before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I'll do my best to always put God and neighbor ahead of ego, but I want to find myself, and if finding myself means losing my ego self, I'll go there.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I'm leaving out some of the hugely successful megachurches, of which I have very little experience.
Barbara Brown Taylor
When someone asks us where we want to be in our lives, the last thing that occurs to us is to look down at our feet and say, 'Here, I guess, since this is where I am.'
Barbara Brown Taylor
You probably can't get much closer to God than serving a congregation 24/7. At the same time, there's a different kind of closeness in this present life I have in which I have much more freedom to come and go and to engage some of the silence and stillness and solitude that I was missing before.
Barbara Brown Taylor
When I say I trust Jesus, that is what I mean: I trust that the way of life leads through perishability, not around it.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I can't help but note that God is being useful to a lot of people trying to do harm to one another.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I miss the hot spots. I miss the hospital calls. I miss the nursing homes. I miss the really intimate human contact with other people, which I did nothing to earn.
Barbara Brown Taylor
The hardest spiritual work in the world is to love the neighbor as the self - to encounter another human being not as someone you can use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control, but simply as someone who can spring you from the prison of yourself, if you will allow it.
Barbara Brown Taylor
When I forget the power of the word, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget the deep relief of telling the truth, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget to look for the holiness all around me, I read Frederick Buechner. When I forget why the gospel matters, I read Frederick Buechner.
Barbara Brown Taylor
I am always surprised by people who speak of faith as if it happens in the air somewhere. Our bodies are God's best way of getting to us. Revelation begins in the flesh.
Barbara Brown Taylor
