Quotes about Acceptance

Talking about real life. The thought of not acting pressed on me like a terror. Can we really trust people to love us just as we are? Nobody steps onto a stage and gets a standing ovation for being human. You have to sing or dance or something. I think that's the difference between being loved and making people clap, though. Love can't be earned, it can only be given. And it can only be exchanged by people who are completely true with each other.

I know now, from experience, that the path to joy winds through this dark valley. I think every well-adjusted human being has dealt squarely with his or her own depravity.

I suppose building a healthy family is possible. Maybe what children really need is simple. Maybe they just need somebody to show them it's okay to be human.

If I was going to make Betsy happy, I'd have to trust that my flaws were the ways through which I would receive grace. We don't think of our flaws as the glue that binds us to the people we love, but they are. Grace only sticks to our imperfections. Those who can't accept their imperfections can't accept grace either.

I didn't want to live in a broken world or a broken me. I wasn't trying to weasel out of anything, I just wasn't in the mood to be on earth that night.

The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up.

The door of mercy is set wide open. The door is not yet locked. The door can be opened. God's heart is full of love. God's heart is full of compassion. Whoever and whatever a person might have been, at midnight or at any time, whenever he returns to God, he will find God willing to receive him, ready to pardon him, and glad to have him at home. All things are ready. Whoever desires to enter can come in.

We must cultivate, all of us, a certain ignorance, a certain blindness, or society will not be tolerable.

It gets harder all the time, Bev Shaw once said. Harder, yet easier. One gets used to things getting harder; one ceases to be surprised that what used to be hard as hard can be grows harder yet.

Expect the unexpected. Focus on what you can control and acknowledge what's out of your control.

Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Successful people speak words of inclusion rather than words of separation, words of acceptance rather than words of rejection, and words of tolerance rather than words of prejudice.