Quotes about Responsibility

I know the weight of carrying more than I should. And usually it's because I've refused to release something before taking on something else. If I want to choose a Best Yes, it's crucial I make room for it first. Otherwise, a Best Yes can quickly become a stressed yes. And a stressed yes is like snow on a tree that refuses to release its leaves. It causes cracks and breaks at our core.

What gives power to all that I fear others are thinking and accusing and saying isn't the people themselves. It isn't even the enemy. I'm the one who decides if their statements have power over me or not. It's me.

I acknowledge that I can control only myself. I can't control how another person acts or reacts.

With the possible exception of ancient Rome, no society has ever auditioned for the role of world policeman. Certainly the United States—at least through the end of the twentieth century—never desired that part. As for the UN, it has shown the ability to play world night watchman. It can monitor and raise the alarm, but it cannot guarantee that the alarm, once sounded, will be answered.

Life, with its rules, its obligations, and its freedoms, is like a sonnet: You're given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. - Mrs. Whatsit

We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts.

It is said that the difference between God and us is that God never thinks he is us. Genesis suggests some nuancing of that insight. God doesn't mind sharing with us the divine life and the divine image and thus the divine responsibility for the world, and eventually God will become one of us.

One question such events provoke is "What kind of God allows this to happen?" Another question we might ask is, "What kind of creatures are human beings that we should cause and allow this to happen?

The balancing act we parents attempt is convincing our children: 1. You are loved more than you can imagine. 2. The world does not revolve around you.

This is the time for a young man to stop saying, "Why is life so hard?" He takes the hardness as the call to fight, to rise up, take it on.

We reframe everything by one simple choice: I am accepting God's invitation to become a man. From there we interpret jobs, money, relationships, flat tires, bad dates, even our play time as the context in which the boy is becoming a man. We take an active role, asking our Father to speak to us, speak to our identity, to validate us. We step into our fears and accept "hardship as discipline.

As Buechner says, we are in constant danger of being not actors in the drama of our lives but reactors, "to go where the world takes us, to drift with whatever current happens to be running the strongest.