Quotes about Desert

Maybe the desert wisdom of the Dakotas can teach us to love anyway, to love what is dying, in the face of death, and not pretend that things are other than they are. The irony and wonder of all of this is that it is the desert's grimness, its stillness and isolation, that brings us back to love.

Here we discover the paradox of the contemplative life, that the desert of solitude can be the school where we learn to love others.

As we crossed the Colorado-Utah border I saw God in the sky in the form of huge gold sunburning clouds above the desert that seemed to point a finger at me and say, Pass here and go on, you're on the road to heaven.

I'd rather die than be famous, I want to go live in the desert With long wild hair, eating At my campfire, full of sand

The great illusion of leadership is to think that man can be led out of the desert by someone who has never been there.

Only the desert has a fascination--to ride alone--in the sun in the forever unpossessed country--away from man. That is a great temptation.

Only cactuses had perennial appeal. And cactuses were of no interest to her.

I heard the main reason the Israelites spent forty years wandering in the desert looking for the Promised Land was because Moses refused to ask directions.

The Negeb, the south of Israel, is a vast desert. The watercourses of the Negeb are a network of ditches cut into the soil by wind and rain erosion. For most of the year they are baked dry under the sun, but a sudden rain makes the desert ablaze with blossoms. Our lives are like that—drought-stricken—and then, suddenly, the long years of barren waiting are interrupted by God's invasion of grace.

I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.

Sunsets steal our breath. Caribbean blue stills our hearts. Newborn babies stir our tears. But take all these away—strip away the sunsets, oceans, and cooing babies—and leave us in the Sahara, and we still have reason to dance in the sand. Why? Because God is with us.

To pick up the Sword of the Spirit without the Shield of Faith is to shrivel and dry up in the desert of legalism. To pick up the Shield of Faith without the Sword of the Spirit is to try walking by faith on quicksand.