Quotes about Receptiveness

Whom is He trying to teach? To whom is He explaining His message? To infants just weaned from milk? To babies removed from the breast?

Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

And while from inside we would hear coughs and stirrings, there was never a rustle in the listeners out the door.

A deaf ear is the first indication of a closed mind.

William A. Hewitt, Chairman of Deere and Company, says, "To be a leader you must preserve all through your life the attitude of being receptive to new ideas. The quality of leadership you will give will depend upon your ability to evaluate new ideas, to separate change for the sake of change from change for the sake of me.

Humility opens the ears of opportunity.

But if men will not forego all pre-imbibed opinions, prejudices, and conceptions of mind, however rivetted into them by traditions, custom, veneration of elders, and secular advantages, to hearken unto and receive whatever he shall speak unto them, and that with a humble, lowly frame of heart, they will never learn the truth, nor attain a "full assurance of understanding" in the mysteries of God.

The moment she removed his head from the body, she felt the strange and intoxicating touch of freedom. That anonymity of the body was a suddenly discovered paradise. With an odd delight, she expelled her wounded and too vigilant soul and was transformed into a simple body without past or memory, but all the more eager and receptive. She tenderly caressed Eva's face, while the headless body moved vigorously on top of her.

Sometimes we yearn for God to crack open a receptive door to share our faith. We scramble to grab an opportunity that never seems to come. Other times God swings open a door so quickly we're too stunned to walk through it!

Because we approach the gospel with preconceived notions of what it should say rather than what it does say, the Word no longer falls like rain on the parched ground of our souls. It no longer sweeps like a wild storm into the corners of our comfortable piety. It no longer vibrates like sharp lightning in the dark recesses of our nonhistoric orthodoxy. The gospel becomes, in the words of Gertrude Stein, … a pattering of pious platitudes spoken by a Jewish carpenter in the distant past.

How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?

To many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a particular influence, subduing them into receptiveness.