"a female teacher who can't speak her mind to a male colleague or superior, is unlikely to offer genuine inspiration, or be a positive role model, to a female student." Melissa Benn

"Indifferent permissiveness is a form of not caring." Melissa Benn

"all young women are the daughters of women who want more than they may have achieved." Melissa Benn

"we must not leave... public discussion to our fathers, husbands, brothers or sons while unwittingly silencing our daughters in the name of good manners or urge compliance for the sake of maintenance of relationship." Melissa Benn

"Ambition, for me, is to be - and to become - fully oneself, with all the learning, studying, crafting, working, failing and trying again, that that entails." Melissa Benn

"Female anger is unruly, base, frightening... Female anger is seen as madness. To be pitied. I do get angry a lot - for feminist reasons. I've decided it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. You have to make a bargain with yourself. Living by your feminist principles, means social isolation." Melissa Benn

"truth lies beyond the word 'god.'" Reyna Biddy

"...I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints..." Elizabeth Barrett Browning

"...Before your questioning, knowledge. By knowledge I mean familiarity. By questioning I mean you dug for my bones." Brittany Cavallaro

"It's difficult when things are brought to an end when you aren't ready for them to be over." Christopher DiRaddo

"I worked hard to "get better" but was unknowingly restored by the simplest, most passive moments, like appreciatating the water's blues lapping onto my feet, the mountians in springtime with snow lagging on their caps, or finding stones in pretty colours and holding them in my pocket, feeling their texture in my palm as I walked." Jackie Kai Ellis

"You may never find what you want, standing in places you've already looked." Jackie Kai Ellis

"To argue in such hypothetical terms can sometimes become an excuse for maintaining a way of thinking that is otherwise unsupportable." Peter Enns

"The incarnation is a scandalously irreducible and mysterious entity... Jesus may be more than human, but he is definitely not less than human..." Peter Enns

"She holds her lips parted always, as if she tastes the very world..." Tessa Gratton

"Harry Potter might be a wizard but I'm sure he never hacked a woman to pieces." Katie Henry

"I thought, I suppose, of the future; but, if I did so, the view was limited. I could see no farther than that evening... One day, no doubt, I should start worrying again, making plans and patterns, trying to organize my life... But for the moment I was... happy in the mere knowledge that yet another stage of my journey had begun." Christopher Isherwood

"What I chiefly felt was sheer utter weariness at the thought of even trying to explain to him just what I do believe and what I mean by "believe", and what's really important to me in Hinduism and what isn't, etc, etc, etc..." Christopher Isherwood

"the obligation to pray and tell your beads and remember God is always there. It can't ever be finished, like scrubbing a floor." Christopher Isherwood

"now we are never seperated. I woke up actually knowing that. I can't say that I still know it. in that absolute, sense, as I write these words, but at least I can still vividly rememver how I felt at the time. Christopher Isherwood

"I see now it was silly to expect some melodramatic transformation. Now I understand that the dying and being reborn are a gradual process." Christopher Isherwood

"GOD was by definition everywhere, and therefore also up in the sky, but it was to be looked for first inside yourself. It wasn't to be thought of as a Boss to be obeyed but as a Nature to be known" Christopher Isherwood

"enlightenment is not loss of individuality but enlargement of individuality, because you realize that you're everything." Christopher Isherwood

"My life becomes devided and untruthful... there are, of course dozens of audiences which would be ready to accept the drink, sex, and art. To these I could also talk about God without falseness. Such audiences are not to be found within the Vedanta Society" Christopher Isherwood

"Should one regard the guru as being the same as God?"..."Yes... But I'm not that kind of guru... I am the dust of the feet of Maharaj... There is some holiness even in the dust." Christopher Isherwood

"'divine discontent.' ...You shouldn't be contented in spiritual life. You should always want more." Christopher Isherwood

"if death isn't the end, then I believe that ...there will be "the real situation" and there will be the many who are still unable or unwilling to accept it... My own problem will be, presumably, that I find myself in the Ramakrishna loka--and how my individualistic ego shrinks from that prospect! How could I endure the combined presence of God? Well, I suppose that is what the concept of purgatory is all about. You hate it until you slowly and painfully learn to love it, and when you do, it automatically becomes paradise." Christopher Isherwood

"my god is not waiting inside a church... my god is beating inside us infinitely" Rupi Kaur

"Authenticity is not the watering down of your message to help someone accept your words. Authenticity, I think, is simply trying to find the kindest way to tell the whole truth." Erin Loechener

"the Gospels constantly and amazingly emphasize the irresponsible, imprudent, joyful, and deeply 'un-sensible' side of Jesus. This man who wanders round Galilee with no wife, no children, and no visible means of supporting himself except the savings of the women who follow him; who calls on his followers to be like the lilies of the field, taking no thought for the morrow; who welcomes and consorts with tax-collectors and sinners and who eats and drinks in their houses with enthusiasm, whose contribution to a wedding is to produce over a hundred gallons of wine, who allows a devote to anoint him with a jar of spikenard 'which might have been sold ... and given to the poor', who orders his disciples to go out into the cities of Galilee with neither food nor money and to live off charity. This is the Jesus who allow Martha to slave away washing dishes in the kitchen so that her sister Mary can sit in the front room and talk to him about the meaning of life. This is a man who consistently values freedom over control; impulse over reflection; desire over restraint' paradox over reason; wit over effort; and joy over work." Simon Loveday

"The Gospels remind us that Jesus spoke often, but wrote only once, and it is not accidental that he wrote in sand, emphasizing the paradox that the spoken word can sometimes last longer than the written." Simon Loveday

"Where religion seeks to control, vision seeks to liberate. The imagination, which is where vision resides, is always in opposition because its limits are not the permissible, but the conceivable." Simon Loveday

"feminism should be angry. It should be angry because women are... being sold a lie of equality in a society where the odds are... stacked against us." Ellie Mae O'Hagan

"Her faith was a conscious decision, a hard-earned achievement, constantly evolving to deal with her family's agnosticism and her own bisexuality. I wore my own faith like the shirt I fell asleep in because I was too lazy to change." Lianne Oelke

"While they call it 're-invent' I call it coming home" Courtney Peppernell

"When you let someone into your heart and they make a mess, you don't have to keep them in your life." Courtney Peppernell

"It is not your responsibility to be the foothold as someone else grows up. If you know where you are and what you want, don't apologize for not being interested in people who don't." Courtney Peppernell

"To you my prayers are no blasphemy: the old books tell me I am related to you in a thousand ways." Rainer Maria Rilke

"...blessed are those who never turned away and blessed are those who stood quietly in the rain. Theirs shall be the harvest..." Rainer Maria Rilke

"It’s not a lack of intelligence; it’s a lack of curiosity" Kiley Roache

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in the grass, the world is to full to talk about. Ideas, Language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense." Rumi

"it is not suprising that investigation of sex differences in language should have begun by looking for the excessive talkativeness of women. However, here, perhaps more than any other research area, findings were in complete contradiction with the stereotype of women's language. There has not been one study which provides evidence that women talk more than men, and there have been numerous studies which indicate that men talk more than women... The concept of women as the talkative sex involves a comparison: they must talk to much aginst some sort of standard or yardstick and we have erroneously assumed that the measurement of women is in comparison to men. But this appears not to be the case. The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence." Dale Spender

"if you love a city with its lights on, you will have to love it even when it is on fire." Noor Unnahar

"you wanted to know about...the melancholy...but I couldn't tell you...sometimes some things do not have a story" Noor Unnahar

"decide what Creator is. If you decide She is peace, love, humility and non-judgement, you decide to work toward embodying those qualities in your walkabout world. The closer you get to that, the closer you are to finding Creator." Richard Wagamese

"Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, ... rather than to root them out. The mind must be strong that resolutely forms its own principles; for a kind of intellectual cowardice prevails which makes many men shrink from the task, or only do it by halves. Yet the imperfect conclusions thus drawn, are frequently very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on just, though narrow, views." Mary Wollstoncraft

"Ignorance is a frail base for virtue!" Mary Wollstoncraft

"the heart made to beat time to humanity" Mary Wollstoncraft

"I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or principles to her heart" Mary Wolstoncraft

"a true leader is one who aspires to make those around him think critically and percieve the world with an open mind. To honor a true leader, you don't follow them; you show them that their philosophies and acations encouraged you to free your mind to think." Najwa Zebian

"If you must explain to others why they need to respect you, they better wonder why you respect them in the first place. If they don't think you deserve to be treated with the most basic human value, what makes them think they deserve it?" Najwa Zebian