Bono Stories Of Surrender Quotes

You can disagree on everything but still work together on one thing... if that one thing is important enough.

Someone has likened prayer to being on a rough sea in a small boat with no oars. All you have is a rope that, somewhere in the distance, is attached to the port. With that rope you can pull yourself closer to God. Songs are my prayers.

It takes great faith to have no faith.

My fear is that I/we have fallen asleep in the comfort of our freedom.

Climbing into the ring, the best-prepared fighter is the one who has tried to understand their opponent. Especially if it’s yourself.

I mostly find religiosity annoying, right up at the top of the annoying is the pigheaded certainty of the devout without the doubt.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend toward justice. It has to be bent, and this requires sheer force of will. It demands our sharpest focus and most concentrated effort. History does not move in a straight line; it has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, all the way down the line.

I’m not sure a professional psychologist would agree, but something in me understands that until we deal with our most traumatic traumas, there’s a part of us that stays at the age at which we encountered them.

Well, while I hope God is with those of us who live such comfortable lives, I know God is with the poorest and most vulnerable.

If you’re not at the table you’re on the menu?

The search for common ground starts with the search for higher ground, even with your opponents, especially with your opponents...You don't have to agree on everything if the one thing you do agree on is important enough.

Failure is when you give your enemies the confirmation, they were right all along to have you in their shit list,

There's stuff you can learn from people who don't tell you anything.

Wailing, keening, trying to explain the unexplainable. Trying to release himself and anyone who will listen from the prison of a human experience that cannot explain grief.

your dreams don’t scare you, they are not big enough.

Fame is a currency. I want to spend mine on the right stuff.

The elephant in the room" is a phrase I enjoy, having at different times been either elephant or room. We can lose ourselves in situations or conversations and miss the obvious. We're looking for someone to save us or a solution to a problem, and they're right in front of us hiding in plain sight.

There’s stuff you can learn from people who don’t tell you anything. Like how not to react when there is a crisis. Like how to stay still and maybe even unearth levity from the seriousness of a situation. Edge is the silence inside every noise. He’s the light inside the paint.

I'm lost, I'll probably always be lost.

I hadn't done drugs since sniffing Lady Esquire shoe polish when I was fifteen. I didn't need to. I felt the pinch of wonder.

We begin by looking out for our children, and in time, if we are so blessed, we find they are looking out for us.

When you’re open, a hitchhiker—a “randomer,” as my daughter Eve calls them—can become an angel.

If you’re where you should be, you’ll meet whom you need to meet.

We can debate whether information or matter is at the heart of the physical universe, but there is no argument that the essential building block of the rock 'n' roll solar system is the van.

--that we humans have little or no influence on the two most important moments of our life. Being born and dying. That felt like the right kind of fuck-you to the universe that a great punk rock song requires.

Our work is borders, crossing them. Borders are a big attraction for me, leaving one country on the way to another, leaving one thought on the way to another, leaving our teens for our twenties, leaving East for West Germany. The liminal is the place to be. The bleeding edge. The demilitarized zones of the psyche, the gray ones of the heart. No-man’s-land is yes-man’s-land.

and still am, suspicious of the idea of oneness. I don’t buy into the homogeneity of the human experience. I don’t think we’re all one. We can be one, but I don’t think we have to see things the same way for that to be so. An anarchic thought: We’re one but we’re not the same. We get to carry each other, not that we’ve got to, just that we get to.

Service, ambition, duty, loyalty, the desire to be the best, the desire to say yes—not such bad character traits to have cherished. I always thought of them as strengths, but lately I wonder if somewhere along the line they became a cover for something more suspicious. The demand to be at the center of the action. To make God in our own image, to help her across the road as if she were a little old lady. This perpetual longing to be filled with the extraordinary so that you begin to lose appreciation for the ordinary.

The poetry and politics of the Christmas story hit me as if I were hearing it for the first time: the idea that some force of love and logic inside this mysterious universe might choose self-disclosure in the jeopardy of one impoverished child, born on the edge of nowhere, to teach us how we might live in service to one another is overwhelming. Its eloquence is overwhelming. Unfathomable power expressed in powerlessness. I nearly laugh out loud. Genius. Inexpressible presence choosing to be present not in palace but in poverty.

Strikingly, only once does Jesus speak about judgment, and when he does, it’s about how we treat the poor: And they too will reply, “Lord, when did we see You hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to You?” Then the King will answer, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for Me.” And yet for some reason even now people of faith think that what’s going on in their—or other people’s—pants is more important to God than, say, what’s happening to the homeless. The lives of the poorest people are at the heart of Christianity, but sometimes religion seems to be what happens when Jesus, like Elvis, has left the building. It becomes a bless me club for the Holy Rollers and navel gazers.