Youth Encouragement Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Youth Encouragement. Here they are! All 100 of them:

A young outcast will often feel that there is something wrong with himself, but as he gets older, grows more confident in who he is, he will adapt, he will begin to feel that there is something wrong with everyone else.
Criss Jami (Killosophy)
This year, mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in word and deed. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Apologize. Try to understand. Examine your demands on others. Think first of someone else. Be kind. Be gentle. Laugh a little more. Express your gratitude. Welcome a stranger. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love and then speak it again.
Howard W. Hunter
Know yourself fearlessly (even quietly) for all the things you are.
Aberjhani (Visions of a Skylark Dressed in Black)
Advice to my younger self: 1 Start where you are with what you have 2 Try not to hurt other people 3 Take more chances 4 If you fail, keep trying
Germany Kent
The past encourages me, the present electrifies me, and I have little fear for the future; and my hope is that the rest of my life shall by far surpass the extravagances of my youth.
Marquis de Sade (Juliette)
This Christmas mend a quarrel. Seek out a forgotten friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a letter. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in word and deed. Keep a promise. Forgo a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Apologize. Try to understand. Examine your demands on others. Think first of someone else. Be kind. Be gentle. Laugh a little more. Express your gratitude. Welcome a stranger. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love, and then speak it again.
Howard W. Hunter
It was always the view of my parents," Emily said, "that hot weather encouraged loose morals among young people.
Ian McEwan (Atonement)
For trans and nonbinary youth: You're beautiful. You're important. You're valid. You're perfect.
Kacen Callender (Felix Ever After)
Encourage kids to enjoy running and play in athletics. Don't force them to run too much competition.
Arthur Lydiard
Though no one can backtrack and create a brand new start, Everyone is capable of taking their life in a brand new direction.
Germany Kent
Youth need guidance, direction, and proper restraint...Parents, too, have a responsibility in this training not to provoke children to wrath. They should be considerate not to irritate by vexatious commands or place unreasonable blame. Whenever possible they should give encouragement rather than remonstrance or reproof.
David O. McKay
I write because I'm free, because I can, because I will. I write because I must, because I'm breathing, because I'd go crazy otherwise, because it's who I am. I write to make a statement, to share my thoughts, to discover myself, to express my ideas. But most of all, I write for future generations. I write for love. I write to inspire. I write to encourage. I write for me.
Nadège Richards
Dear Young Black Males, Encourage yourself, believe in yourself, and love yourself. Never doubt who you are. Always believe in yourself, even if nobody else does. Strive to be self-motivated!
Stephanie Lahart
One thing is certain: the arts keep you alive. They stimulate, encourage, challenge, and, most of all, guarantee a future free from boredom. They allow growth and even demand it in that time of life we call maturity but too often enter it with a childish faith that what we learned in youth is sustenance enough for the years when most men are mentally famished but won't admit it—or when they are apt to curb their hunger with the sops of complacency, security, and the assurance of death.
Vincent Price (I Like What I Know: A Visual Autobiography)
As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live,1 because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?
Giacomo Leopardi (Zibaldone)
The youth of Idaho falls should be encouraged to take drugs in order to cope up with the fact that there is plutonium in their drinking water.
Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America)
If we throw blankets over our children's dreams, we darken their world and extinguish their desire to live.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
God knew He had to create you in a way that would suit your story.
Tessa Emily Hall (Coffee Shop Devos: Daily Devotional Pick-Me-Ups for Teen Girls)
I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up:that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if theses faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality.
Ursula K. Le Guin
When I was a child, I thought like a child. When I became adult, I seek a deeper understanding of life.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
The children are the future, so, let's tell them about tomorrow's hope rather than yesterday's despair.
Onyi Anyado
You don't have to sit there and keep losing valuable years of life with a man who's not right for you...You have to keep moving forward and believe that God has the right person for you...the right person to give you strength and encouragement to keep you jumping toward your dreams.
Steve Harvey (Jump: Take the Leap of Faith to Achieve Your Life of Abundance)
The enemy, however, is not the historically imagined enemy of brown or black youth, more often depicted as America's problem than as its promise. The enemy is not the nameless, faceless, yet ethnically imagined terrorist that we have been encouraged to fear in the post-9/11 environment. Rather, the greater enemy to American democracy is more likely to be an uninformed and uncritical American public that can be manipulated by soothing political slogans, feelgood photo ops, and an endless round of holiday sales.
Patricia Hill Collins (On Intellectual Activism)
An attachment grew up. What is an attachment? It is the most difficult of all the human interrelationships to explain, because it is the vaguest, the most impalpable. It has all the good points of love, and none of its drawbacks. No jealousy, no quarrels, no greed to possess, no fear of losing possession, no hatred (which is very much a part of love), no surge of passion and no hangover afterward. It never reaches the heights, and it never reaches the depths. As a rule it comes on subtly. As theirs did. As a rule the two involved are not even aware of it at first. As they were not. As a rule it only becomes noticeable when it is interrupted in some way, or broken off by circumstances. As theirs was. In other words, its presence only becomes known in its absence. It is only missed after it stops. While it is still going on, little thought is given to it, because little thought needs to be. It is pleasant to meet, it is pleasant to be together. To put your shopping packages down on a little wire-backed chair at a little table at a sidewalk cafe, and sit down and have a vermouth with someone who has been waiting there for you. And will be waiting there again tomorrow afternoon. Same time, same table, same sidewalk cafe. Or to watch Italian youth going through the gyrations of the latest dance craze in some inexpensive indigenous night-place-while you, who come from the country where the dance originated, only get up to do a sedate fox trot. It is even pleasant to part, because this simply means preparing the way for the next meeting. One long continuous being-together, even in a love affair, might make the thing wilt. In an attachment it would surely kill the thing off altogether. But to meet, to part, then to meet again in a few days, keeps the thing going, encourages it to flower. And yet it requires a certain amount of vanity, as love does; a desire to please, to look one's best, to elicit compliments. It inspires a certain amount of flirtation, for the two are of opposite sex. A wink of understanding over the rim of a raised glass, a low-voiced confidential aside about something and the smile of intimacy that answers it, a small impromptu gift - a necktie on the one part because of an accidental spill on the one he was wearing, or of a small bunch of flowers on the other part because of the color of the dress she has on. So it goes. And suddenly they part, and suddenly there's a void, and suddenly they discover they have had an attachment. Rome passed into the past, and became New York. Now, if they had never come together again, or only after a long time and in different circumstances, then the attachment would have faded and died. But if they suddenly do come together again - while the sharp sting of missing one another is still smarting - then the attachment will revive full force, full strength. But never again as merely an attachment. It has to go on from there, it has to build, to pick up speed. And sometimes it is so glad to be brought back again that it makes the mistake of thinking it is love. ("For The Rest Of Her Life")
Cornell Woolrich (Angels of Darkness)
When you try to be someone else, you’re not only neglecting your true self; you’re also sacrificing the potential God has planted within you. The potential to rise to your calling, reach others through your gifts, and make a difference.
Tessa Emily Hall (Coffee Shop Devos: Daily Devotional Pick-Me-Ups for Teen Girls)
God...made childhood joyous, full of life, bubbling over with laughter, playful, bright and sunny. We should put into their childhood days just as much sunshine and gladness, just as much cheerful pleasure as possible. Pour in the sunshine about them in youth. Let them be happy, encourage all innocent joy, provide pleasant games for them, romp and play with them; be a child again among them. Then God's blessing will come upon your home, and your children will grow up sunny-hearted, gentle, affectionate, joyous themselves and joy-bearers to the world.
J.R. Miller
Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.
Huey P. Newton (Revolutionary Suicide)
My own luck was being born white and middle-class into a house full of books, with a father who encouraged me to read and write. So for about twenty years I wrote for a particular man, who criticized and praised me and made me feel I was indeed "special." The obverse side of this, of course, was that I tried for a long time to please him, or rather, not to displease him. And then of course there were other men - writers, teachers - the Man, who was not a terror or a dream but a literary master and a master in other ways less easy to acknowledge. And there were all those poems about women, written by men: it seemed to be a given that men wrote poems and women frequently inhabited them. These women were almost always beautiful, but threatened with the loss of beauty, the loss of youth - the fate worse than death. Or, they were beautiful and died young, like Lucy and Lenore. Or, the woman was like Maud Gonne, cruel and disastrously mistaken, and the poem reproached her because she had refused to become a luxury for the poet.
Adrienne Rich (On Lies, Secrets, and Silence. Selected Prose 1966-1978)
Story, in other words, continues to fulfill its ancient function of binding society by reinforcing a set of common values and strengthening the ties of common culture. Story enculturates the youth. It defines the people. It tells us what is laudable and what is contemptible. It subtly and constantly encourages us to be decent instead of decadent. Story is the grease and glue of society: by encouraging us to behave well, story reduces social friction while uniting people around common values. Story homogenizes us; it makes us one. This is part of what Marshall McLuhan had in mind with his idea of the global village. Technology has saturated widely dispersed people with the same media and made them into citizens of a village that spans the world.
Jonathan Gottschall (The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human)
Balzac has incomparably described how the example of Napoleon electrified an entire generation in France. To Balzac the brilliant rise of the insignificant Lieutenant Bonaparte to the rank of emperor of the world meant not only the triumph of an individual, but the victory of the idea of youth. That one did not have to be born a prince or a duke to achieve power at an early age, that one might come from any humble and even poor family and yet be a general at twenty-four, ruler of France at thirty and of the entire world, caused hundreds, after this unique success, to abandon petty vocations and provincial abodes. Lieutenant Bonaparte had fired the minds of an entire generation of youth. He drove them to aspire to higher things, he made the generals of the Grande Armée the heroes and careerists of the comédie humaine. It is always an individual young person who achieves the unattainable for the first time in any field, and thus encourages all the youngsters around him or who come after him, by the mere fact of his success.
Stefan Zweig (The World of Yesterday)
Let’s strive to become as protective over our time with God as we are with our daily cup of brew. Let’s become addicted to our “spiritual caffeine fix.
Tessa Emily Hall (Coffee Shop Devos: Daily Devotional Pick-Me-Ups for Teen Girls)
At this time of the year it seems that everything ought to be creative, not destructive, and that we should encourage things to live and not die.
Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth)
My youthful heart still holds the buoyancy of promise. Even though it is scarred by the ravages of time, there is still hope and possibilities to explore.
Andrew Pacholyk (Barefoot ~ A Surfer's View of the Universe)
Great stories changed our heart and penetrated our soul.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
We encouraged volunteers to think of themselves not as people who run errands to keep a program going but as spiritual directors in the lives of students. Chris Folmsbee
Mark DeVries (Sustainable Youth Ministry: Why Most Youth Ministry Doesn't Last and What Your Church Can Do About It)
Don't you find it odd...that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.
Ethan Hawke (The Hottest State)
LGBT youth still need as much support as we can provide, so I encourage each of us to share our stories, so that we can be real together.
Robyn Ochs (REC*OG*NIZE: The Voices of Bisexual Men)
And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Aesculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre? And what kind of deeds are recorded of each of these reputed sons of Jupiter, it is needless to tell to those who already know. This only shall be said, that they are written for the advantage and encouragement of youthful scholars; for all reckon it an honourable thing to imitate the gods. But far be such a thought concerning the gods from every well-conditioned soul, as to believe that Jupiter himself, the governor and creator of all things, was both a parricide and the son of a parricide, and that being overcome by the love of base and shameful pleasures, he came in to Ganymede and those many women whom he had violated and that his sons did like actions. But, as we said above, wicked devils perpetrated these things. And we have learned that those only are deified who have lived near to God in holiness and virtue; and we believe that those who live wickedly and do not repent are punished in everlasting fire.
Justin Martyr (The First Apology of Justin Martyr, Addressed to the Emperor Antoninus Pius; Prefaced by Some Account of the Writings and Opinions of Justin)
So-called gnosis’ was an enormous temptation in the early Christian Church. By contrast, persecution, even the bloodiest, posed far less of a threat to the Church’s continuing purity and further development. Gnosticism had its roots in late antiquity, drew on oriental and Jewish sources, and multiplied into innumerable esoteric doctrines and sects. Then, like a vampire, the parasite took hold of the youthful bloom and vigour of Christianity. What made it so insidious was the fact that the Gnostics very often did not want to leave the Church. Instead, they claimed to be offering a superior and more authentic exposition of Holy Scripture, though, of course, this was only for the ‘superior souls’ (‘the spiritual’, ‘the pneumatic’); the common folk (‘the psychic’) were left to get on with their crude practices. It is not hard to see how this kind of compartmentalizing of the Church’s members, indeed of mankind as a whole, inevitably encouraged not only an excited craving for higher initiation, but also an almost unbounded arrogance in those who had moved from mere ‘faith’ to real, enlightened ‘knowledge’.
Irenaeus of Lyons (The Scandal of the Incarnation: Irenaeus Against the Heresies)
With my own pupils now I always try to remember the value of encouragement. Sometimes a callow youth appears who may be a fool or may be a genius and I would rather be guilty of encouraging a fool than of discouraging a genius.
Alain Frogley (The Cambridge Companion to Vaughan Williams (Cambridge Companions to Music))
Jo gave her sister an encouraging pat on the shoulder as they parted for the day, each going a different way, each hugging her little warm turnover, and each trying to be cheerful in spite of wintry weather, hard work, and the unsatisfied desires of pleasure-loving youth.
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women)
By the age of twelve, he was using the family typewriter to correspond with a number of well-known local geologists about the rock formations he had studied in Central Park. Not aware of his youth, one of these correspondents nominated Robert for membership in the New York Mineralogical Club, and soon thereafter a letter arrived inviting him to deliver a lecture before the club. Dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults, Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a twelve-year-old. Greatly amused, Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor. On the designated evening, Robert showed up at the club with his parents, who proudly introduced their son as “J. Robert Oppenheimer.” The startled audience of geologists and amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium; a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so that the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern. Shy and awkward, Robert nevertheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty round of applause. Julius
Kai Bird (American Prometheus)
I don’t think older Christians can ever fully know what an important role they play in the affirmation of younger believers. When you’re just a youth, it means so much to have someone who’s farther along the road say to you, “I see something in you, and I want you to be encouraged in it.
Ravi Zacharias (Walking from East to West: God in the Shadows)
Everything starts from home. If the father isn’t there, then the friends are going to step up to influence the young boy astray. This is where the problems come in, because in my community the majority of the children do not have any fathers in the home. I can only speak for my community. This is why with the young guys who do hang around me, I always do my best to encourage them. I have already lived the negative side on the streets, so I prefer to encourage them on the positive side - to encourage them to get a job, save their money and to do something for their families.Franco ‘Co’ Bethel, former gang leader and right hand man to Scrooge.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
The relative complexity of modern society offers the further benefit of convincing the youth that their parents are idiots, that all of their ancestors were uncivilized morons, and that their heritage is rooted inextricably in primitive and immoral thinking. This encourages the youth to reject their parents, their ancestors, their traditions, and wisdom in favor of the arbitrary demands and assertions of the establishment.
J.M. Rock (Death by Socialism)
Easy beauty was apparent and unchallenging: "A simple tune; a simple spatial rhythm... a one; a youthful face, or the human form in its prime, all these afford a plain straightforward pleasure..." Conversely, difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insights endurance, and our capacity or attention. In difficult beauty, one often encourages intricacy, tension, and width. The intricacy of a difficult aesthetic object can provoke resentment and disgust in us if we are unable to resolve and classify the complex elements of the object. Difficult beauty also required us to stay in a state of "high tension of feeling," and it is our own weakness - the "weakness of the spectators," says Bosanquet, taking the phrase from Aristotle - that causes us to shrink from the challenge of difficult beauty. "The capacity to endure and enjoy feeling at high tension is somewhat rare.
Chloé Cooper Jones (Easy Beauty)
decadence that infected Florence during its period of relative peace, when Leonardo was a young artist there: “The youth having become more dissolute than before, more extravagant in dress, feasting, and other licentiousness, and being without employment, wasted their time and means on gaming and women; their principal study being how to appear splendid in apparel, and attain a crafty shrewdness in discourse. These manners derived additional encouragement from the followers of the duke of Milan, who,
Walter Isaacson (Leonardo Da Vinci)
Dear Young Black Males… I encourage you to upgrade your thinking! Read books, articles, quotes, and other materials that will enhance your thinking and mindset. Embrace literature that will help propel you to greatness! Read information that will educate, empower, inspire, and motivate you. If you don’t understand the definition of a word, look it up in a dictionary. Broaden your vocabulary by utilizing the thesaurus, too. Knowledge is power, so make sure that you fill your mind with things that make you more and more powerful every day!
Stephanie Lahart
...it was encouraging too, for where the returned Anglo-Indian sat by rights (he knew crowds of them) in the Oriental Club biliously summing up the ruin of the world, here was he, as young as ever; envying young people their summer time and the rest of it, and more than suspecting from the words of a girl, from a housemaid's laughter — intangible things you couldn't lay your hands on—that shift in the whole pyramidal accumulation which in his youth had seemed immoveable. On top of them it had pressed; weighed them down, the women especially, like those flowers Clarissa's Aunt Helena used to press between sheets of grey blotting-paper with Littré's dictionary on top, sitting under the lamp after dinner.
Virginia Woolf (Mrs. Dalloway)
The pain of the loss, the true loss of youth, the change of life, THE CHANGE, the terrible sure feeling of being shunted out of the everyday progress of living, the move from a player on the stage to a member of the audience—until finally, the fear that crept and inched into your mind, then your soul, that your life had amounted to too little. Like some version of that joke, life was terrible and in such small portions. And finally, the realization that you hadn’t performed enough or well enough and now everyone you loved would suffer. Why hadn’t anyone said something? Of course older women had said in their way. By way of warning and encouragement, they had told Sylvia not to get old. “Don’t get old!” they’d said. Like anyone ever in the history of time had had any intention of that.
Stephanie Powell Watts (No One Is Coming to Save Us)
The Arab world has done nothing to help the Palestinian refugees they created when they attacked Israel in 1948. It’s called the ‘Palestinian refugee problem.’ This is one of the best tricks that the Arabs have played on the world, and they have used it to their great advantage when fighting Israel in the forum of public opinion. This lie was pulled off masterfully, and everyone has been falling for it ever since. First you tell people to leave their homes and villages because you are going to come in and kick out the Jews the day after the UN grants Israel its nationhood. You fail in your military objective, the Jews are still alive and have more land now than before, and you have thousands of upset, displaced refugees living in your country because they believed in you. So you and the UN build refugee camps that are designed to last only five years and crowd the people in, instead of integrating them into your society and giving them citizenship. After a few years of overcrowding and deteriorating living conditions, you get the media to visit and publish a lot of pictures of these poor people living in the hopeless, wretched squalor you have left them in. In 1967 you get all your cronies together with their guns and tanks and planes and start beating the war drums. Again the same old story: you really are going to kill all the Jews this time or drive them into the sea, and everyone will be able to go back home, take over what the Jews have developed, and live in a Jew-free Middle East. Again you fail and now there are even more refugees living in your countries, and Israel is even larger, with Jerusalem as its capital. Time for more pictures of more camps and suffering children. What is to be done about these poor refugees (that not even the Arabs want)? Then start Middle Eastern student organizations on U.S. college campuses and find some young, idealistic American college kids who have no idea of what has been described here so far, and have them take up the cause. Now enter some power-hungry type like Yasser Arafat who begins to blackmail you and your Arab friends, who created the mess, for guns and bombs and money to fight the Israelis. Then Arafat creates hell for the world starting in the 1970s with his terrorism, and the “Palestinian refugee problem” becomes a worldwide issue and galvanizes all your citizens and the world against Israel. Along come the suicide bombers, so to keep the pot boiling you finance the show by paying every bomber’s family twenty-five thousand dollars. This encourages more crazies to go blow themselves up, killing civilians and children riding buses to school. Saudi Arabia held telethons to raise thousands of dollars to the families of suicide bombers. What a perfect way to turn years of military failure into a public-opinion-campaign success. The perpetuation of lies and uncritical thinking, combined with repetitious anti-Jewish and anti-American diatribes, has produced a generation of Arab youth incapable of thinking in a civilized manner. This government-nurtured rage toward the West and the infidels continues today, perpetuating their economic failure and deflecting frustration away from the dictators and regimes that oppress them. This refusal by the Arab regimes to take an honest look at themselves has created a culture of scapegoating that blames western civilization for misery and failure in every aspect of Arab life. So far it seems that Arab leaders don’t mind their people lagging behind, save for King Abdullah’s recent evidence of concern. (The depth of his sincerity remains to be seen.)
Brigitte Gabriel (Because They Hate)
We must break these intertwined systems of oppression. Every time we look to the police and prisons to solve our problems, we reinforce these processes. We cannot demand that the police get rid of those “annoying” homeless people in the park or the “threatening” young people on the corner and simultaneously call for affordable housing and youth jobs, because the state is only offering the former and will deny us the latter every time. Yes, communities deserve protection from crime and even disorder, but we must always demand those without reliance on the coercion, violence, and humiliation that undergird our criminal justice system. The state may try to solve those problems through police power, but we should not encourage or reward such short-sighted, counterproductive, and unjust approaches. We should demand safety and security—but not at the hands of the police. In the end, they rarely provide either.
Alex S. Vitale (The End of Policing)
The logic of demand creation requires that women smoke and drink in public, move about freely, and assert their right to happiness instead of living for others. The advertising industry thus encourages the pseudo-emancipation of women, flattering them with its insinuating reminder, 'You've come a long way, baby,' and disguising the freedom to consume as genuine autonomy. Similarly it flatters and glorifies youth in the hope of elevating young people to the status of full-fledged consumers in their own right, each with a telephone, a television set, and a hi-fi in his own room. The 'education' of the masses has altered the balance of forces within the family, weakening the authority of the husband in relation to the wife and parents in relation to their children. It emancipates women and children from patriarchal authority, however, only to subject them to the new paternalism of the advertising industry, the industrial corporation, and the state.
Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations)
Nevertheless, for the most part the intangible dangers of being observed by unintended audiences are considered secondary to the convenience of instantaneous access to this “virtual campfire” from the comfort of the home. While online social networking sites are often disparaged as poor replacements for human interaction that encourage superficial relationships, my ethnographic analysis reveals how some people, American youth in particular, are incorporating this medium into their everyday practices in more or less meaningful ways. Through elucidating both the dangers and possibilities of this medium, I seek to encourage people to create their own “virtual campfires” as a supplement to, rather than a replacement of, their offline lives. Through participation and sharing in meaningful ways- from conversation to creating art- we might begin to see these sites as vehicles for healing the widely-felt loss of community and the pervasive sense of alienation experienced by so many.
Jennifer Anne Ryan (The Virtual Campfire: An Ethnography of Online Social Networking)
At last they came to the lower slopes of the great mountains. Here she met a wild and bedraggled boy. He stumbled across her when she had stopped to rest and suckle the baby. The boy stared at the unlikely pair for a moment, then seated himself on the ground at a respectful distance, obviously preparing to converse. He was the strangest looking boy she had ever seen. Evidently a changeling like herself, for he was tall and straight with long slender limbs, but his hair was golden like the sun and his eyes a deep blue like the sky. He looked to be about fifteen years old, not quite a man, yet man enough to survive. She guessed he must have originated from the fabled district of Shor, in the far south, where it was rumoured that all the people were changelings, and all golden-haired. Astelle tensed, fully expecting Torking to deliver one of his pain bolts to the curious boy, but the child seemed unperturbed, and simply carried on suckling. This boy's attention was obviously not deemed as a threat. She relaxed and smiled at the youth. He returned the smile, white teeth startling against his tanned and dirty face. ‘Why are you travelling all alone?’ he asked. Encouraged by Torking's mindwhispers, Astelle managed to concoct a story very close to the truth. ‘As you can see, my child is rather unusual,’ she explained. ‘I could not bear to raise him among mortals who would constantly deride and insult him – and his father has left me, so I had no choice but to run from my tribe.’ Sympathy appeared in the deep blue eyes. ‘I understand that very well,’ he said. ‘I am an escaped slave. I was captured in infancy, and have no memory of my own people, but all my life I have been mocked and abused because I am different. My name is Bren. I would like to travel with you, if you don't mind. I could take care of you both.’ ‘Keep him,’ Torking mindwhispered. ‘He will be useful to fish and hunt for us. But do not tell him that I speak to you.’ Astelle smiled. ‘Thank you Bren,’ she said. ‘I will be glad of your company. I am called Astelle.’ ‘A Faen name...’ he said wonderingly. They began to climb the mountains of Clor.
Bernie Morris (The Fury of the Fae)
FROM THE WAVERLEY KITCHEN JOURNAL Angelica - Will shape its meaning to your need, but it is particularly good for calming hyper children at your table. Anise Hyssop - Eases frustration and confusion. Bachelor’s Button - Aids in finding things that were previously hidden. A clarifying flower. Chicory - Conceals bitterness. Gives the eater a sense that all is well. A cloaking flower. Chive Blossom - Ensures you will win an argument. Conveniently, also an antidote for hurt feelings. Dandelion - A stimulant encouraging faithfulness. Frequent side effects are blindness to flaws and spontaneous apologies. Honeysuckle - For seeing in the dark, but only if you use honeysuckle from a brush of vines at least two feet thick. A clarifying flower. Hyacinth Bulb - Causes melancholy and thoughts of past regrets. Use only dried bulbs. A time-travel flower. Lavender - Raises spirits. Prevents bad decisions resulting from fatigue or depression. Lemon Balm - Upon consumption, for a brief period of time the eater will think and feel as he did in his youth. Please note if you have any former hellions at your table before serving. A time-travel flower. Lemon Verbena - Produces a lull in conversation with a mysterious lack of awkwardness. Helpful when you have nervous, overly talkative guests. Lilac - When a certain amount of humility is in order. Gives confidence that humbling yourself to another will not be used against you. Marigold - Causes affection, but sometimes accompanied by jealousy. Nasturtium - Promotes appetite in men. Makes women secretive. Secret sexual liaisons sometimes occur in mixed company. Do not let your guests out of your sight. Pansy - Encourages the eater to give compliments and surprise gifts. Peppermint - A clever method of concealment. When used with other edible flowers, it confuses the eater, thus concealing the true nature of what you are doing. A cloaking flower. Rose Geranium - Produces memories of past good times. Opposite of Hyacinth Bulb. A time-travel flower. Rose Petal - Encourages love. Snapdragon - Wards off the undue influences of others, particularly those with magical sensibilities. Squash and Zucchini Blossoms - Serve when you need to be understood. Clarifying flowers. Tulip - Gives the eater a sense of sexual perfection. A possible side effect is being susceptible to the opinions of others. Violet - A wonderful finish to a meal. Induces calm, brings on happiness, and always assures a good night’s sleep.
Sarah Addison Allen (Garden Spells (Waverly Family #1))
Is it as bad out there as they say it is?” he asked. “From my six-inch window, it looks like we got hit with one hell of a storm.” “It took me nearly an hour to shovel the sidewalk this morning,” Jordan said. Kyle brushed his neck-length dark blond hair off his face. “See? That’s one of the positives of being in prison. No shoveling.” Her brother had long ago set the rules regarding their visits. Jokes about being in prison were expected and encouraged, sympathy was not. Which was good for both of them, considering her family had never done particularly well with the mushy and sentimental stuff. “You live in a penthouse condo and haven’t shoveled snow for years,” she pointed out. “A deliberate choice I made because of the trauma of my youth,” Kyle said. “Remember how Dad used to make me shovel the whole block every time it snowed? I was eight when he came up with that plan—barely taller than the shovel.” “And I got to stay inside making hot chocolate with Mom.” Jordan waved off the retort she saw coming. “Hey, it was good for you—it built character.” She paused for a moment, taking in their steel-barred surroundings. “Maybe Dad should’ve made you shovel the next block over, too.” “That’s cute.” “I thought so.
Julie James (A Lot like Love (FBI/US Attorney, #2))
Grace adored Amelia. The older woman was a close friend of her grandmother and mother, and a constant in Grace's life. She visited Amelia often. The inn was her second home. As a child she'd always raced up the stairs and raided Amelia's bedroom closet, and Amelia had encouraged her unconventional behavior. Grace had loved dressing up in vintage clothing. Attempting to walk up in a pair of high button shoes. Amelia was the first to recognize Grace's love of costume. Her enjoyment of tea parties. She'd supported Grace's dream of opening her business, Charade, when Grace sought a career. From birthdays to holidays, the costume shop was popular and successful. Grace couldn't have been happier. She admired Amelia now. Her long, braided hair was the same soft gray as her eyes. Years accumulated, but never seemed to touch her. She appeared youthful, ageless, in a sage-green tunic, belted over a paisley gauze skirt in shades of cranberry, green, and gold. Elaborate gold hoops hung at her ears, ones designed with silver beads and tiny gold bells. The thin metal chains on her three-tiered necklace sparkled with lavender rhinestones and reflective mirror discs. Bangles of charms looped her wrist. A thick, hammered-silver bracelet curved near her right elbow. A triple gold ring with three pearls arched from her index finger to her fourth. She sparkled.
Kate Angell (The Cottage on Pumpkin and Vine)
The attachment voids experienced by immigrant children are profound. The hardworking parents are focused on supporting their families economically and, unfamiliar with the language and customs of their new society, they are not able to orient their children with authority or confidence. Peers are often the only people available for such children to latch on to. Thrust into a peer-oriented culture, immigrant families may quickly disintegrate. The gulf between child and parent can widen to the point that becomes unbridgeable. Parents of these children lose their dignity, their power, and their lead. Peers ultimately replace parents and gangs increasingly replace families. Again, immigration or the necessary relocation of people displaced by war or economic misery is not the problem. Transplanted to peer-driven North American society, traditional cultures succumb. We fail our immigrants because of our own societal failure to preserve the child-parent relationship. In some parts of the country one still sees families, often from Asia, join together in multigenerational groups for outings. Parents, grandparents, and even frail great-grandparents mingle, laugh, and socialize with their children and their children's offspring. Sadly, one sees this only among relatively recent immigrants. As youth become incorporated into North American society, their connections with their elders fade. They distance themselves from their families. Their icons become the artificially created and hypersexualized figures mass-marketed by Hollywood and the U.S. music industry. They rapidly become alienated from the cultures that have sustained their ancestors for generation after generation. As we observe the rapid dissolution of immigrant families under the influence of the peer-oriented society, we witness, as if on fast-forward video, the cultural meltdown we ourselves have suffered in the past half century. It would be encouraging to believe that other parts of the world will successfully resist the trend toward peer orientation. The opposite is likely to be the case as the global economy exerts its corrosive influences on traditional cultures on other continents. Problems of teenage alienation are now widely encountered in countries that have most closely followed upon the American model — Britain, Australia, and Japan. We may predict similar patterns elsewhere to result from economic changes and massive population shifts. For example, stress-related disorders are proliferating among Russian children. According to a report in the New York Times, since the collapse of the Soviet Union a little over a decade ago, nearly a third of Russia's estimated 143 million people — about 45 million — have changed residences. Peer orientation threatens to become one of the least welcome of all American cultural exports.
Gabor Maté (Hold On to Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More Than Peers)
How had she ended up like this, imprisoned in the role of harridan? Once upon a time, her brash manner had been a mere posture - a convenient and amusing way for an insecure teenage bride, newly arrived in America, to disguise her crippling shyness. People had actually enjoyed her vituperation back then, encouraged it and celebrated it. She had carved out a minor distinction for herself as a 'character': the cute little English girl with the chutzpah and the longshoreman's mouth. 'Get Audrey in here,' they used to cry whenever someone was being an ass. 'Audrey'll take him down a peg or two.' But somewhere along the way, when she hadn't been paying attention, her temper had ceased to be a beguiling party at that could be switched on and off at will. It had begun to express authentic resentments: boredom with motherhood, fury at her husband's philandering, despair at the pettiness of her domestic fate. She hadn't noticed the change at first. Like an old lady who persists in wearing the Jungle Red lipstick of her glory days, she had gone on for a long time, fondly believing that the stratagems of her youth were just as appealing as they had ever been. By the time she woke up and discovered that people had taken to making faces at her behind her back - that she was no longer a sexy young woman with a charmingly short fuse but a middle-aged termagant - it was too late. Her anger had become a part of her. It was a knotted thicket in her gut, too dense to be cut down and too deeply entrenched in the loamy soil of her disappointments to be uprooted.
Zoë Heller (The Believers)
In order to explain what that was, I must start by describing the encounter between myself and the sun. In fact, this experience occurred on two occasions. It often happens that, long before the decisive meeting with a person from whom only death can thereafter part one, there is a brief brush elsewhere with that same person occurring with almost total unawareness on both sides. So it was with my encounter with the sun. My first—unconscious—encounter was in the summer of the defeat, in the year 1945. A relentless sun blazed down on the lush grass of that summer that lay on the borderline between the war and the postwar period—a borderline, in fact, that was nothing more than a line of barbed wire entanglements, half broken down, half buried in the summer weeds, tilting in all directions. I walked in the sun’s rays, but had no clear understanding of the meaning they held for me. Finespun and impartial, the summer sunlight poured down prodigally on all creation alike. The war ended, yet the deep green weeds were lit exactly as before by the merciless light of noon, a clearly perceived hallucination stirring in a slight breeze; brushing the tips of the leaves with my fingers, I was astonished that they did not vanish at my touch. That same sun, as the days turned to months and the months to years, had become associated with a pervasive corruption and destruction. In part, it was the way it gleamed so encouragingly on the wings of planes leaving on missions, on forests of bayonets, on the badges of military caps, on the embroidery of military banners; but still more, far more, it was the way it glistened on the blood flowing ceaselessly from the flesh, and on the silver bodies of flies clustering on wounds. Holding sway over corruption, leading youth in droves to its death in tropical seas and countrysides, the sun lorded it over that vast rusty-red ruin that stretched away to the distant horizon.
Yukio Mishima (Sun & Steel)
Unqualified Champions Consider these individuals from the Bible. Each person was aware of a personal shortcoming which should have rendered him disqualified for service. God, however, saw champion potential … Moses struggled with a speech impediment: “Then Moses said to the LORD, ‘Please, Lord, I have never been eloquent, neither recently nor in time past, nor since You have spoken to Your servant; for I am slow of speech and slow of tongue’” (Exodus 4:10). Yet God served as Moses’ source of strength. God used him to deliver the Israelites from bondage. Jeremiah considered himself too young to deliver a prophetic message to an adult population: “Then I said, ‘Alas, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, because I am a youth’” (Jeremiah 1:6). God’s reply: “Do not be afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you,” (Jeremiah 1:8). Isaiah, whose encouragement I quoted earlier, had reservations of his own. Perhaps his vocabulary reflected my own—especially my vocabulary as a teenager: “I am a man of unclean lips” (Isaiah 6:5). Despite Isaiah’s flaws, God saw him as a man He could use to provide guidance to the nation of Judah. Paul the Apostle had, in his past, persecuted the very people to whom God would send him later. To most of us, Paul’s track record would disqualify him for use. But God brought change to Paul’s heart and redemption to his fervency. Samson squandered his potential through poor life choices. As I read about him, I can’t help but think, “The guy acted like a spoiled brat.” But God had placed a call on his life. Though Samson sank to life’s darkest depths—captors blinded him and placed him in slavery—at the end of his life, he turned his heart toward God and asked to be used for God’s purposes. God used Samson to bring deliverance to the Israelites. Do you feel like the least qualified, the least important, the least regarded? Perhaps your reward is yet to come. God has high regard for those who are the least. Jesus said, “For the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great” (Luke 9:48) and “But many who are first will be last; and the last, first” (Matthew 19:30). If heaven includes strategic positioning among God’s people, which I believe it will, that positioning will be ego-free and based on a humble heart. Those of high position in God’s eyes don’t focus on position. They focus on hearts: their own hearts before God, and the hearts of others loved by God. When we get to heaven, I believe many people’s positions of responsibility will surprise us. What if, in heaven, the some of today’s most accomplished individuals end up reporting to someone who cried herself to sleep at night—yet kept her heart pure before God? According to Jesus in Matthew 6:5, some rewards are given in full before we reach heaven. When He spoke those words, He referred to hypocritical religious leaders as an example. Could we be in for a heavenly surprise? I believe many who are last today—the ultimate servants—will be first in heaven. God sees things differently than we do.
John Herrick (8 Reasons Your Life Matters)
But won’t political involvement distract us from the main task of preaching the Gospel? At this point someone may object that while political involvement may have some benefits and may do some good, it can so easily distract us, turn unbelievers away from the church, and cause us to neglect the main task of pointing people toward personal trust in Christ. John MacArthur writes, “When the church takes a stance that emphasizes political activism and social moralizing, it always diverts energy and resources away from evangelization.”83 Yet the proper question is not, “Does political influence take resources away from evangelism?” but, “Is political influence something God has called us to do?” If God has called some of us to some political influence, then those resources would not be blessed if we diverted them to evangelism—or to the choir, or to teaching Sunday School to children, or to any other use. In this matter, as in everything else the church does, it would be healthy for Christians to realize that God may call individual Christians to different emphases in their lives. This is because God has placed in the church “varieties of gifts” (1 Cor. 12:4) and the church is an entity that has “many members” but is still “one body” (v. 12). Therefore God might call someone to devote almost all of his or her time to the choir, someone else to youth work, someone else to evangelism, someone else to preparing refreshments to welcome visitors, and someone else to work with lighting and sound systems. “But if Jim places all his attention on the sound system, won’t that distract the church from the main task of preaching the Gospel?” No, not at all. That is not what God has called Jim to emphasize (though he will certainly share the Gospel with others as he has opportunity). Jim’s exclusive focus on the church’s sound system means he is just being a faithful steward in the responsibility God has given him. In the same way, I think it is entirely possible that God called Billy Graham to emphasize evangelism and say nothing about politics and also called James Dobson to emphasize a radio ministry to families and to influencing the political world for good. Aren’t there enough Christians in the world for us to focus on more than one task? And does God not call us to thousands of different emphases, all in obedience to him? But the whole ministry of the church will include both emphases. And the teaching ministry from the pulpit should do nothing less than proclaim “the whole counsel of God” (Acts 20:27). It should teach, over the course of time, on all areas of life and all areas of Bible knowledge. That certainly must include, to some extent, what the Bible says about the purposes of civil government and how that teaching should apply to our situations today. This means that in a healthy church we will find that some people emphasize influencing the government and politics, others emphasize influencing the business world, others emphasize influencing the educational system, others entertainment and the media, others marriage and the family, and so forth. When that happens, it seems to me that we should encourage, not discourage, one another. We should adopt the attitude toward each other that Paul encouraged in the church at Rome: Why do you pass judgment on your brother? Or you, why do you despise your brother? For we will all stand before the judgment seat of God…. So then each of us will give an account of himself to God. Therefore let us not pass judgment on one another any longer, but rather decide never to put a stumbling block or hindrance in the way of a brother (Rom. 14:10–13). For several different reasons, then, I think the view that says the church should just “do evangelism, not politics” is incorrect.
Wayne Grudem (Politics - According to the Bible: A Comprehensive Resource for Understanding Modern Political Issues in Light of Scripture)
Although some observers believe that feminism and sexual liberalism no longer threaten family values, little in fact has changed. Contemporary sexual liberals are merely less honest than earlier feminists in facing the inevitable antifamily consequences of their beliefs. They continue to maintain that the differences between men and women, such as men's greater drive to produce in the workplace, are somehow artificial and dispensable. They still insist that men and women can generally share and reverse roles without jeopardizing marriage. They still encourage a young woman to sacrifice her twenties in intense rivalry with men, leaving her to clutch desperately for marriage as her youthfulness and fertility pass. Although they declare themselves supporters of the family, they are scarcely willing to define it.
George Gilder (Men and Marriage)
Little did I comprehend at the time that through this musical I was being subtly introduced to a new religious system. One song ridiculed the faith of my youth. It encouraged us not to believe in God per se, but instead, to see that we ourselves were like gods.
Caryl Matrisciana (Out of India)
The darkest hour precedes a great future.
Martin Uzochukwu Ugwu
There's a Cherokee proverb that tells of two wolves inside us all. It states the one that wins is the one you feed the most. It is told to encourage the youth to be good, but as adults we must see reality. In a perfect world we could all be good always. We do not live in a perfect world, we must strive for a balance that will allow us to defend against the evils of this world. We must feed both wolves. We can be good and be kind in the situations that we can, but there are those that wish to harm us and those we love. When facing a threat we must be willing to unleash the evil wolf and do what is necessary to survive and protect. We must sometimes handle a situation viciously and with aggression. We must let the good wolf lead, but keep the evil wolf at the ready to keep the rabid dogs at bay.
Dutton Phillips
One day I was through Strachan’s Corner just hanging out, and they must have picked up Scrooge earlier for a pep talk, so they were now dropping him back home in one of their police vehicle. Supt. Strachan was in the back seat talking with him, while a male officer was driving. So I asked her, what were some of the things you used to say to Scrooge? I used to tell him it is not worth it, You are hurting people. You are only going to end up in jail for the rest of your life, or you are going to end up in the grave. I knew that he was listening to me. I would talk to him and encourage him. My other colleagues used to say I was soft on crime because of what I was doing, but I could be tuff. I am a mother of two sons; just ask my sons how tuff I can be. If I feel that I have done the best that I can, and cannot do no more than that is it. This was what I was telling those kids down there. I told them if you do not change, you are going to die. Sad to say, that is what happened to some of them eventually. The best came out of you and others in another way. Supt. Allerdyce Strachan, the first female officer to rise to the rank of superintendent on the Royal Bahamas Police Force.
Drexel Deal (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped Up in My Father (The Fight of My Life is Wrapped in My Father Book 1))
To those of us who pride ourselves on being “informal,” I’d encourage us to consider what story we could possibly be telling without form. Is our story merely about how cool our pastor is and how loud our subwoofers are? Or have we truly developed a biblical theology of worship that imparts the only story that really matters to the next generation?
Sarah Arthur (The God-Hungry Imagination: The Art of Storytelling for Postmodern Youth Ministry)
Today, many of us seem to live our lives like honeybees collecting honey which, at the end, we will leave to others for their enjoyment! Our values are often twisted. Our success is largely measured by the size of our bank account, how beautiful or handsome we are, or how luxurious are our homes, cars or boats. Reality TV shows continue to appeal to millions of us who choose to live vicariously through others, rather than taking charge of our own lives and focusing on manifesting the hidden resources that are invested in our souls. Women are often encouraged to seek superficial and temporary beauty, at the risk of endangering their health, even killing themselves, while men are encouraged to appreciate and chase a life of pleasure. In contrast, those whose lives are centered on spirituality are frequently ridiculed as old-fashioned or at least looked down upon. We seek surgical procedures to fight the natural aging process and enjoy ‘borrowed youth’ a bit longer, even though we know, deep in our hearts, that it is ultimately a losing battle.
Farnaz Masumian (The Divine Art Of Meditation: Meditation and visualization techniques for a healthy mind, body and soul)
There is still, I think, not enough recognition by teachers of the fact that the desire to think - which is fundamentally a moral problem - must be induced before the power is developed. Most people, whether men or women, wish above all else to be comfortable, and thought is a pre-eminently uncomfortable process; it brings to the individual far more suffering than happiness in a semi-civilised world which still goes to war, still encourages the production of unwanted C3 children by exhausted mothers, and still compels married partners who hate one another to live together in the name of morality.
Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth)
If there is a person who should be encouraged in the taking of the Sabbath, it is the youth pastor. Not to mention we should be training them for lifelong ministry. Sabbath-breaking, of course, cannot sustain lifelong ministry. “Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it” (Prov. 22:6). That points us to the communal side of Sabbath-keeping. For we almost always pass along to others what we ourselves have received from others.
A.J. Swoboda (Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World)
Is everything all right?” Sinead O’Maurieagh. Born simply Susan Murray, but a youthful inflammation of love for the land of her grandfather, a Kerry man, encouraged her to rechristen herself in the unpronounceable Gaelic and take up Irish step-dancing, which she now taught to the little Liams, Shamuses and Deirdres of South Boston.
James Dempsey (MURPHY'S AMERICAN DREAM)
The longer he stayed home, the more he felt like a social misfit—and he soon was seeing no one. Eventually he got help toward recovery by visiting a youth club called an ibasho—a safe place where broken people start reintroducing themselves to society. What if we thought of the church as an ibasho? Without a doubt, we are a community of broken people. When Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, he described their former way of life as antisocial, harmful, and dangerous to themselves and others (1 Corinthians 6:9–10). But in Jesus they were being transformed. And Paul encouraged these rescued people to love one another, to be patient and kind, not to be jealous or proud or rude (13:4–7). The church is to be an ibasho where we can find God’s love. May the hurting world experience Christ’s compassion from all who follow Him. Poh Fang
Our Daily Bread Ministries (God Hears Her: 365 Devotions for Women by Women)
Extremists with malicious tendencies…have always been with us, but today our culture is saturated with misinformation and conspiracy theories. Even when falsehoods don’t contribute to bloodshed, they frighten people and turn us against one another. The decline and respect for objective truth and facts, means we lack a stable underpinning on which to base our debates and ultimately out decisions. When I was a journalist starting out in Bosnia, I viewed the conflict there as a last gasp of ethnic chauvinism and demagoguery from a bygone era. Unfortunately, it now seems more like a harbinger of the way today’s autocrats and opportunists conjure up internal or external threats in order to expand their own power. Those of us who reject these tactics have yet to figure out how to assuage the fears of those who have been shaken or radicalized by false claims. While my generation was often told about the impending triumph of democracy and human rights, today’s youth are bombarded with commentary forecasting the retreat of liberal democracy or even its demise. A growing mistrust in democratic institutions breeds cynicism about politics and America’s future and encourages an inward focus.
Samantha Power (The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir)
He heard voices—well, a voice. He called it his daemon. “This began when I was a child,” he explained during his trial on charges of impiety and corrupting the youth of Athens. “It is a voice, and whenever it speaks it turns me away from something I am about to do, but it never encourages me to do anything.” Taken together, Socrates’s peculiar appearance and idiosyncrasies made him otherworldly.
Eric Weiner (The Socrates Express: In Search of Life Lessons from Dead Philosophers)
LORD, This world is a broken, painful place for my son to navigate as he grows. He’ll experience physical illness and injuries. Trusted friends and family may betray his confidence. The dreams he holds for the future may crumble. Goals he works hard to achieve can end in failure. He may find himself lonely, broke, sick, or disappointed. As he looks for ways to relieve his pain or find distraction from his troubles, he may end up looking in all the wrong places. Keep my son from the trap of addiction as he seeks comfort in this world. The pleasures of food, alcohol, sex, entertainment, drugs, and money can offer a temporary diversion from the pain in his heart. But these same pleasures can become a trap that steals his freedom to live in your peace and righteousness. Don’t let my son’s heart become enslaved to anything or anyone but you. Let him find his greatest satisfaction in your presence. Give him discernment to identify temptations that come his way. May he have strength to “flee the evil desires of youth and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart” (2 Tim. 2: 22). Surround my son with believers who will encourage him to walk in your ways. Give him humility to ask for help if he’s overtaken by any sin. Open my eyes to see any areas of bondage that are developing in his life. Show me the boundaries to set to guard him from temptations that may be too hard to resist. Show my son that you are his true comfort. You offer a future of perfect peace and love with you. Your plans for him are good and perfect. You are his one true, faithful friend. You are the source of everything he needs. You hold the answers to all of his questions. Let my son live in your freedom. Keep his eyes on you. May he offer his life fully to you and obey you with all his heart. Amen.
Rob Teigen (Powerful Prayers for Your Son: Praying for Every Part of His Life)
As a result, it’s important that any burgeoning youth football coaching legend foster ties with the local school system. As you can probably imagine, I’m not without enemies at the local elementary school. I ask my players to stop doing most of their homework during the fall so that they can focus on football, and I encourage their parents to hold them out of school on game days. This offends a lot of teachers.
Three Year Letterman (Determined Look: Life Lessons of a Youth Football Coaching Legend)
Though we are a missionary agency, with our eyes firmly fixed on reaching the whole world, that is not our deepest motivation. If it were, we would be in constant danger of being over-driven … We seek to multiply an environment in which each person is encouraged and provoked to seek a constantly growing relationship with God. From that intimacy with God, we know He will lead us, individually, as teams, and as an entire movement to demonstrate and proclaim the knowledge of Him to people everywhere.
Darlene Cunningham (Values Matter: Stories of the Beliefs & Values that Shaped Youth With A Mission)
In Southampton, Jones secured the twenty-one-year-old cooper John Alden, who because of his youth and skills was already being encouraged by the Pilgrims to remain in America at the completion of the crossing.
Nathaniel Philbrick (Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War)
GROWING UP changes one’s definition of what is fun — maturation does that, thankfully — so I hate to admit now that as a boy I thoroughly enjoyed throwing rocks at cars. It was a thrill to wait in hiding, ambush the car driving by, and then make our escape. Occasionally, a driver would stop their vehicle and get out to yell at us. But if we were really fortunate, they would chase us. We would run just far enough ahead to encourage them, but when they got close, we would turn on the afterburners of youth, leaving them far behind while we laughed hysterically. Once in a while, the police would come by — usually in unmarked cars — and the chase would be much more dramatic until we reached the ten-foot-tall fences at the end of the neighborhood field. To the police, it must have appeared as if they had us trapped. They had no idea, however, how practiced we were at vaulting those fences. We treated it like an Olympic event, running at full speed toward the fence and then leaping high into the air, grabbing the chain links, and allowing the momentum of our feet to swing us over the top and down on the other side. We would laugh at the police as we ran off, knowing there was no way they would follow us. Today I have great admiration for the police, who risk their lives on a daily basis to protect our lives, freedom, and property.
Ben Carson (America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great)
Evangelism and stewardship, women’s and men’ ministries, youth ministry, Sunday school, worship, social justice ministries, and even pastoral care must be held accountable to this one question: how does what we are doing encourage and enable others to live lives of active faith?
Michael W. Foss (Power Surge: Six Marks Of Discipleship For A Changing Church)
Let the oldest saint look well to the fundamentals of his piety, for grey heads may cover black hearts: and let not the young professor despise the word of warning, for the greenness of youth may be joined to the rottenness of hypocrisy.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Morning and Evening—Classic KJV Edition: A Devotional Classic for Daily Encouragement)
This fear of the upheld mirror in the hand of genius extends to the teaching profession and perhaps to the primary and secondary school teacher most of all. The teacher occupies a particularly anomalous and exposed position in a society subject to rapid change or threatened by exterior enemies. Society is never totally sure of what it wants of its educators. It wants, first of all, the inculcation of custom, tradition, and all that socializes the child into the good citizen. In the lower grades the demand for conformity is likely to be intense. The child himself, as well as the teacher, is frequently under the surveillance of critical, if not opinionated, parents. Secondly, however, society wants the child to absorb new learning which will simultaneously benefit that society and enhance the individual's prospects of success. Thus the teacher, in some degree, stands as interpreter and disseminator of the cultural mutations introduced by the individual genius into society. Some of the fear, the projected guilt feelings, of those who do not wish to look into the mirrors held up to them by men of the Hawthorne stamp of genius, falls upon us. Moving among innovators of ideas as we do, sifting and judging them daily, something of the suspicion with which the mass of mankind still tends to regard its own cultural creators falls upon the teacher who plays a role of great significance in this process of cultural diffusion. He is, to a degree, placed in a paradoxical position. He is expected both to be the guardian of stability and the exponent of societal change. Since all persons do not accept new ideas at the same rate, it is impossible for the educator to please the entire society even if he remains abjectly servile. This is particularly true in a dynamic and rapidly changing era like the present. Moreover, the true teacher has another allegiance than that to parents alone. More than any other class· in society, teachers mold the future in the minds of the young. They transmit to them the aspirations of great thinkers of which their parents may have only the faintest notions. The teacher is often the first to discover the talented and unusual scholar. How he handles and encourages, or discourages, such a child may make all the difference in the world to that child's future- and to the world. Perhaps he can induce in stubborn parents the conviction that their child is unusual and should be encouraged in his studies. If the teacher is sufficiently judicious, he may even be able to help a child over the teetering planks of a broken home and a bad neighborhood. It is just here, however--in our search for what we might call the able, all-purpose, success-modeled student--that I feel it so necessary not to lose sight of those darker, more uncertain, late-maturing, sometimes painfully abstracted youths who may represent the Darwins, Thoreaus, and Hawthornes of the next generation.
Loren Eiseley
The glory of youth is the grace of strength.
Lailah Gifty Akita
As it turned out, my church sent their youth to summer camps more to gain a vision of social justice than of personal religious experience. I was elected to represent Oklahoma at a regional church youth camp in Fayetteville, Arkansas. There the national youth leadership outlined their plan for the future and taught us about the labor movement, grasping capitalists and the need for total disarmament. From then on my intellectual trajectory was poised for leaping much further to the political left. That meant Henry Wallace and the Farmer Labor wing go of the Democratic Party. Those hurdles happened abruptly, and my course was set early. The national Methodist youth movement was a world of its own, with extensive organization and strong political convictions. It was designed for propaganda that promoted social change according to the Social Gospel vision pouring out of the theological schools. My distant ideological mentors for that dream were socialist candidate Norman Thomas, pacifist pioneer A. J. Muste and British Hyde Park Donald Soper. I got this indoctrination second- and third-hand from reading and from going to youth conferences on all levels--local, district, conference, jurisdictional and national levels. As a teenage I was not sufficiently self-critical to see any unintended consequences and such talk was not encouraged.
Thomas C. Oden (A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir)
Be wise in time. What youth sows, old age must reap....Sow to yourself rather in righteousness: break up your fallow ground, sow not among thorns.
J.C. Ryle (Thoughts for Young Men)
Brain scans have shown that high-end brands evoke the same neural response as religious images; that, shocking and lamentable though it may be, an iPod has the same effect as Mother Teresa. Also, the windows displaying these material icons extend from floor to ceiling, completely exposing the bright interiors, and the entrances are wide and doorless, so the instinctive fear of entering an unfamiliar enclosed space is overcome. Inside, young, attractive sales staff approach, seeking eye contact with friendly encouraging smiles, creating the illusion of youth and attractiveness in the shopper. The loud soul music suggests a bar or club where mutual attraction can blossom but, unlike the brutally competitive bars and clubs, here there is no possibility of rejection. Spending money is the easiest orgasm. Open the wallet and flash the bright card.
Michael Foley (The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life makes it Hard to be Happy)
Because glamour mythically opposes death and decay its ideal model of perfection is youth. The features of youth dictate many of the facets of glamour's criteria. Small snub noses, fair hair, smooth featureless skin, innocence, Picturing youth as a target of sexual lust inevitably encourages the sexual abuse of children.
Stefan Szczelkun (Class Myths and Culture)
Today, we pause to remember and honour the Canadian men and women who have served our country and fought for freedom around the world. Time may fade, but our memories cannot. We all have a duty to hold the torch high, and to keep its flame alight. Liberty’s cause beats deeply within our hearts, and every generation of Canadians has answered the call to serve. We must remember that, during the First and Second World Wars, Canada and Newfoundland fought side by side. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the Battle of Beaumont-Hamel, when a generation of Newfoundlanders laid down their lives in defence of the freedom, democracy, and diversity that we enjoy today. From Ypres to Vimy Ridge, Dieppe to Juno Beach – we will not forget. From Korea to the Suez, Cyprus to Kandahar – we will not forget. We remember yesterday’s youth, far from home, who fought for reason and progress. They stood up to tyranny and stood for liberty, and sacrificed their future for the future of so many. We honour Canada’s bravest, who stand shoulder to shoulder with our allies around the world. Every day, they face down the threat of terrorism, and protect the values we cherish most. At 11:00 am, I encourage all Canadians – no matter where you are – to observe the two minutes of silence. When we remember, we must remember war as it was and as it is. Freedom’s terrible price is known but to the few who have fought for it. That is why today we stand sombre and silent, with poppies close to our hearts, and take the time to remember. Lest we forget.
Justin Trudeau
In the Sultan Suite   Andy was eagerly awaiting my reappearance. He had nailed as many engaging pictures as he could, and he had done superbly – but I didn’t know that yet.               When I regained position, Lihaar had straddled Aziz’s firmness, and Jabril’s thickness was gyrating within her derriere. The men rocked into her in rhythmic synchronicity while moans of zealous fervencies rose in crescendo from the singer’s throat. Coraline seized the opportunity and plunged her tilting pelvis onto the actress’s face. As if executing a perfect dance the Indian twirled her lecherous tongue into the big sister’s blossoming crevice. Afraid the dark-haired female would evade her pleasure vault, Coraline’s tenacious hands gripped her tightly.               Aziz drove his slithering tongue into Narnia’s wetness, teasing her nether region to groans of rapturous ecstasy. His probing fingers buried deep in her rousing bottom, driving her to bouts of climactic liberations. She shuttered unquenchably to each heaving motion of intimate deliverance. Waves of euphoric ecstasies filled her girlishness. She delivered her youthful exuberance again and again until her heaving breasts laid heavy against the Arab’s muscular chest. After all, I had been taught by great masters of the day – and I was the sorcerer’s apprentice. Therefore, no encouragements were required for me to capture affectionate kisses and private embraces from every bewitching angle. But my task was by no means over. Exotic shots of erotic discharges arrived in the shapely form of Ms. Lihaar riding both phalluses with abandon. Like her little sister Narnia, Coraline had delivered curls of billowing euphoria onto the actress’s face, coating the flawless beauty with dribbling wetness before lapping at her deliverance with sensual jubilations.               The men could no longer withhold their deposits. Sprays of masculinity filled the actress as she milked their pounding manliness to blissful nirvana. Together, my chaperone and I had garnered superlative shots for our patron when we left the Sultan cavern quietly, returning to the Maharajah in pursuit of a saturnalia of unbridled revelry.
Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
Juan Ponce de León On April 2, 1513, according to legend while searching for the Fountain of Youth, Ponce de León discovered Florida. In actual fact, it was more likely that he was out seeking the gold that the Indians were always talking about. The Indians encouraged this sort of talk, in the high hopes of keeping the conquistadors away from them as far as possible. Returning to Spain in 1514, Ponce de León was recognized for his service to the crown and was knighted. Given his own coat of arms, he became the first conquistador to be honored in this way. Although Ponce de León did bring back a substantial amount of gold, much of it had been stolen from the Indians that he had enslaved. In 1521 Ponce de León set out from Puerto Rico to colonize Florida. He commanded a flotilla of two ships containing about 200 men. In this case his exploratory party was peaceful and included farmers, priests and craftsmen. However he was attacked by Calusa braves, a tribe of Indians who lived on the coast and along the rivers and inner waterways of Florida’s southwestern coast. In the skirmish, Ponce de León was wounded when an arrow, believed to have been dipped into the sap of the “Manchineel Tree,” also called Poison Guava, pierced his thigh. After fending off this attack, he and the colonists retreated to Havana, where in July of 1521, he succumbed to his wound and died. In 1559 his body was moved from Cuba and taken to San Juan, Puerto Rico, where he was interred in the crypt of San José Church. In 1836, his remains were exhumed and transferred to the larger, more impressive Cathedral of San Juan Bautista in San Juan. They have remained at this urban, hillside church until this day. This information is from Captain Hank Bracker’s award winning book “The Exciting Story of Cuba” available from Amazon.com and other fine book vendors. Follow, like and share Captain Hank Bracker’s daily blogs & commentaries.
Hank Bracker
Our culture is in need of a sea change in which it’s acceptable to encourage high school graduates to pursue more practical opportunities and vocations, without all the societal pressure to mortgage their youths for a piece of paper.
Shannon Young (Pay Off: How One Millennial Eliminated Nearly $80,000 in Student Debt in Less Than Five Years (Kindle Single))
According to one estimate, of the roughly 1200 foreign fighters captured in Syria between summer 2003 and summer 2005, fully 85 percent were Saudis.24 It is not clear who financed their recruitment, training, and travel from Saudi Arabia to Syria and on to Iraq. It is clear, however, that Wahhabi and Salafi clerics and activists in the kingdom encouraged them to join the anti-Shia, anti-American jihad in Iraq. The sermons that call the youth to jihad in Iraq reek of anti-Americanism, but just as important, if not more so, they echo the old Wahhabi hatred of the Shia. War on America is now war on Shiism, and war on Shiism is war on America.
Vali Nasr (The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future)
Strategies for Welcoming Children Here are some ideas to consider for welcoming children in services: •   Encourage parents to prepare a “shul bag” to bring to the service. In it should be some reading or picture books, a quiet toy, a favorite stuffed animal, a snack and a drink (to be eaten in the hallway), extra diapers, fresh wipes, a pretend tallit, and a kippah. •   Create a children’s area in the rear of the shul by taking out a few pews and establishing a play space for babies and toddlers while parents and grandparents participate in the service. Proximity to the door allows for a quick getaway. •   Offer children a basket of appropriate Shabbat toys to play with at the entrance of the sanctuary. •   Keep a cart of Jewish children’s books for parents to share with children during the service. •   Encourage parents to take the children to babysitting and youth services, clearly sending a message that the main service is geared for adults. The babysitting is first rate, offered in a clean, well-stocked nursery. •   Take a strategy from the megachurches and establish a family room, sometimes called a crying room, in the congregation: a closed-off space constructed of glass where families can make noise, but still hear the service. At Saddleback, young children are most definitely not encouraged in the main sanctuary. But families can use the four family rooms in the building that receive live televised broadcasts of the service or sit just outside the glass walls of the sanctuary where speakers allow the adults to hear the service.
Ron Wolfson (The Spirituality of Welcoming: How to Transform Your Congregation into a Sacred Community)
To give one example, consumerism and juvenilization reinforce one another. People who know who they are, who think carefully about purchases, and who exercise self-control are harder to persuade to buy products they don't really need. In contrast, impulsive people who are searching for a sense of identity, who are looking to salve their emotional pain, who desperately crave the approval of others, and who have lots of discretionary income (or are willing to spend as if they do) make ideal consumers. In other words, encouraging people to settle into some of the worst traits of adolescence is good for business. Not all businesses and advertisers operate on this basis, but enough do to encourage the cult of youth and discourage people from growing up. Considerable evidence suggests that consumers can see through these techniques and resist them to some extent. But immersed as we all are in the culture of adolescence, it becomes increasingly hard to embrace the self-denial and character formation necessary to achieve what used to be called mature adulthood.2
Thomas Bergler (The Juvenilization of American Christianity)
No parents wanted their youth to do this rumspringa wild thing, but they just did it anyway. Rumspringa, in an Amish community, is a time for the youth — when they turn sixteen. Although these young people aren’t encouraged to get a car, many of them do.
Ora Jay Eash (Plain Faith: A True Story of Tragedy, Loss and Leaving the Amish)
The opening of this letter is the easy part. Jesus praises the church for the positive things it is being and doing. The Lord repeats this pattern of opening each letter with encouraging words throughout this section of Scripture. Ironically, praise is crucial to recovery. It instills hope. Most men who struggle sexually have hidden their secret lives of sin for so long that they are hounded by a tremendous fear of being found out. If their fears come true, they may fall into a pit of despair. By contrast, it is the Lord’s nature to be gentle with his people, even when they are in sin. He truly is longsuffering. As the second chapter in Romans points out, “Or do you show contempt for the riches of his kindness, tolerance and patience, not realizing that God’s kindness leads you toward repentance?” (2:4). By offering praise, Jesus gently affirms his love for them. He continued to John in Revelation, “Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols” (2:20). The Lord now transitions into the real issue. First, notice the use of the word tolerate. It appears this church knew what was going on but just looked the other way. Were the leaders merely putting up with open immorality? Not only that, but the woman somehow worked her way into a position of authority—a self-made leader. This situation isn’t unique to the first century. We see the same thing happening today. Many pastors refuse to believe that the men, women, and youth in their churches are viewing pornography and engaging in immoral sexual behaviors. Either they simply don’t want to believe it or they are trapped by the same problems and feel a lack of credibility to address those who are in the wrong. Today, the word tolerance is used as if it were a great virtue. I want to dispel this myth. No doubt God is patient, and we are all living proof of his patience. However, God is not tolerant in that he is consistent in what he does and doesn’t like in our behaviors and hearts. Otherwise Jesus would not have had to die for the sin of the world. The same things that upset him in Genesis upset him throughout Scripture. Remember, “Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8).
Douglas Weiss (Clean: A Proven Plan for Men Committed to Sexual Integrity)
25 Ways to Build Hope in Children Help me build a fort. Stop at my lemonade stand. Read to me. Listen without distractions. Join me in finding animal shapes in the clouds. Model kindness. Create art. Teach me empathy. Put an encouraging note in my lunch. Do something with me to make our block more beautiful. Sing to me. Remind me to share. Be a voice for youth. Celebrate differences. Dance with me. Teach me something new. Help me create a family of snow angels. Tell me campfire stories over s’mores. Take technology breaks. Ask me my opinion. Create a scavenger hunt. Volunteer somewhere together. Put together a neighborhood event. Take me on a bike ride. Talk to me about online and body safety.
Patty Wetterling (Dear Jacob: A Mother's Journey of Hope)
To lovers out there …. Spend your youth days with me so I can spend your old days with you. Spend your good times with me so I can spend your bad times with you. Spend your strong days with me so I can spend your weak days with you. Spend your happy days with me so I can spend your sad days with you. Spend your rich days with me so I can spend your poor days with you. Spend your success days with me so I can spend your failure days with you. Spend your days where you are beautiful with me so I can spend the days where you are no longer attractive with you. The problem is we want to give ourselves to others when we are no longer in good shape or condition. When we are tired, burned out , warned out and exhausted. When we are emotionally damaged, depressed and heart broken. We then want to be loved and accepted by force by those who we rejected when everything was going well for us.
De philosopher DJ Kyos