Barbara Brown Taylor

"An altar is just a table that holds what you cherish most."

"The great religious traditions agree: the divine is not found in noise and crowds, but in silence and solitude."

"Pay attention. It is the only real prayer."

"I believe in the power of paying attention."

"The life I touch for good or ill will touch another life, and that in turn another, until who knows where the ripples stop."

"Fear is the cheapest room in the house. I would like to see you living in better conditions."

"Your daughters are not your daughters, and your sons are not your sons. They are the sons and daughters of life's longing for itself."

"Grace is the theological virtue that does not mean pretty or beautiful or charming; it means unearned love."

"Lose your life and find it. That is the hard promise hidden in Jesus's difficult words."

"I have given up trying to control my own thoughts and have simply tried to pay attention to them instead."

"There is a reason why our souls are hungry. We were made for something more than what we have settled for."

"When you know who you are; when your values are clear to you; it is infinitely easier to say no, to walk away."

"The goal is not to become a saint overnight; it is to practice the holy life with everything we have got."

"Attention is the beginning of devotion."

"The divine is not found in noise and crowds, but in silence and solitude."

"I believe that we are wise when we pay attention to what we actually experience."

"The most compelling feature of my faith now is not how much it explains but how much it calls me to do."

"Practice resurrection."

"God does not need your talents to succeed; what God needs is your willingness to practice them."

"Live as fully as you can, which has nothing to do with the number of breaths you take but with the depth of each one."

"Community is not optional."

"There is a fine line between giving up and letting go."

"The most important prayers often come in the form of decisions."

"Wake up to the life you are living."

"The goal of education is not to increase the amount which people know, but to increase the kinds of things that people want to know."

"Your life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived."

"The truth about life is that it can be hard, but that does not mean it is not beautiful."

"I trust my life to the God who meets me there, not in my ideas about God but in God's presence with me."

"My sense of God is my sense of wonder about the universe."

"The church does not exist for its own sake. It exists for the world."