Quotes about Perception
We cannot live in a world that is interpreted for us by others. An interpreted world is not a hope. Part of the terror is to take back our own listening. To use our own voice. To see our own light. —Hildegard of Bingen
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Ask anyone what she means when she says 'God' and chances are that you will learn a lot more about that person than you will learn about God.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
The real problem has far less to do with what is really out there than it does with our resistance to finding out what is really out there.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Who had persuaded me that God preferred four walls and a roof to wide-open spaces? When had I made the subtle switch myself, becoming convinced that church bodies and buildings were the safest and most reliable places to encounter the living God?
— Barbara Brown Taylor
Christians are not particularly gifted at knowing how we sound to others, especially in parts of the world where our voices are the loudest and most numerous.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
here is the testimony of faith: darkness is not dark to God; the night is as bright as the day.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
They sounded different from the mouth of a young mother than they did from the mouth of a widow. This was because the words did not come straight off the page. They percolated up through the silt and gravel of real people's lives so that the meaning in them was fluid, not fixed.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
When visitors come to a worship service in my own religious tradition, a great deal depends on how warmly they are welcomed and whether they feel included or excluded by what they hear during the short time they are with us. We may have exactly one shot at communicating who we are to people who know nothing about us - or who think they already know a lot about us - but who, in either case, will remember us at the embodiment of our entire tradition, the prime exemplars of our faith.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
One of the quietest revolutions in Religion 101 follows a student's recognition that he or she has a worldview, a particular way of viewing reality that it is not the only way. A worldview is a wave, but not the entire ocean.
— Barbara Brown Taylor
How many times since then have I rejected Love because it did not present itself the way I expected, in a form acceptable to me?
— Barbara Brown Taylor
If I trust what I see on my phone more than what I see out my window, what does it mean to believe that the real world is not where I live?
— Barbara Brown Taylor
I had lived so long in the mainstream that I never even though about how I sounded from the margins
— Barbara Brown Taylor