Best Babcock Quotes & Sayings

Spirituality is best manifested on the ground, not in the air. Rapturous day-dreams, flights of heavenly fancy, longings to see the Invisible, are less expensive and less expressive than the plain doing of duty. To have bread excite thankfulness and a drink of water send the heart to God is better than sighs for the unattainable. To plow a straight furrow on Monday or dust a room well on Tuesday or kiss a bumped forehead on Wednesday is worth more than the most ecstatic thrill under Sunday eloquence. Spirituality is seeing God in common things, and showing God in common tasks. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The world is God's workshop; the raw materials are His; the ideals and patterns are His; our hands are "the members of Christ," our reward His recognition. Blacksmith or banker, draughtsman or doctor, painter or preacher, servant or statesman, must work as unto the Lord, not merely making a living, but devoting a life. This makes life sacramental, turning its water into wine. This is twice blessed, blessing both the worker and the work. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

There is something about Game 7 that there's a memory there for you for sure. You want to be a coach or a manager or a player or a goaltender that gets it done, because to me, that's all part of sports. That's what you dream about when you're a little kid - scoring the winning goal. — Mike Babcock

She wanted us to go on like nothing had ever happened between us. Like she didn't have her hand circled around my heart. Like she wasn't squeezing the life out of it every time she left." ~ Jamie — Catherine Gayle

Dare we let children grow up with no vital contact with the Saviour, never intentionally and consciously put into His arms? Not to bring them to Him, not to teach them to walk toward Him, as soon as they can walk toward anyone, is wronging a child beyond words. The terrible indictment uttered by the Lord, "Them that were entering in ye hindered," and the millstone warning for offending little ones, are close akin to the deserts of those who ruin a man's whole day of life by wronging his morning hours. Not to help a child to know the saving power of Christ is to hold back a man from salvation. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

It was one of those simple facts of life: the sky was blue, gravity kept our feet firmly on the ground, and I loved Katie Weber." ~ Jamie — Catherine Gayle

Be strong! It matters not how deep entrenched the wrong, how hard the battle goes, the day how long, faint not, fight on! Tomorrow comes the song. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Our prayers must mean something to us if they are to mean anything to God. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Babcock knew no Southerners personally but he had seen them in court often enough ... and Ed's manner and appearance said Dixie to him. He imagined Ed at home with his family, a big one, from old geezers to toddlers. He saw them eating their yams and pralines and playing their fiddles and dancing their jigs and guffawing over coarse jokes and beating one another to death with agricultural implements. — Charles Portis

With time and patience, the mulberry leaf becomes satin. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

May death be no more than the bell that sounds when school is over, and going home, may I find that I had laid up my treasure in the right place. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Although there is nothing so bad for conscience as trifling, there is nothing so good for conscience as trifles. Its certain discipline and development are related to the smallest things. Conscience, like gravitation, takes hold of atoms. Nothing is morally indifferent. Conscience must reign in manners as well as morals, in amusements as well as work. He only who is "faithful in that which is least" is dependable in all the world. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Business is religion, and religion is business. The man who does not make a business of his religion has a religious life of no force, and the man who does not make a religion of his business has a business life of no character. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

To have failed is to have striven, to have striven is to have grown. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

You are not responsible for the disposition you are born with, but you are responsible for the one you die with. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

If a friend is the one who summons us to our best, then is not Jesus Christ our best friend, and should we not think of the Communion as one of His chief appeals to us to be our best? The Lord's Supper looks not back to our past with a critical eye, but to our future, with a hopeful one. The Master appeals from what we have been to what we may be. He bids us come, not because we are better than we have been, but because He wants us to be. To stay away because our hearts are cold is to refuse to go to the fire till we are warm. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Worship demands the far distances of God; it protests against the little, the near, the material. It must love but it must look up. It cannot live without the note of spirituality and universality, if not mystery. The ascension, the passing of Christ within the veil, answers this need. So does a full-robed Christianity add to definiteness of knowledge the outreach of imagination and home. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The Christian life that is joyless is a discredit to God and a disgrace to itself. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The tests of life are to make, not break us. Trouble may demolish a man's business but build up his character. The blow at the outward man may be the greatest blessing to the inner man. If God, then, puts or permits anything hard in our lives, be sure that the real peril, the real trouble, is that we shall lose if we flinch or rebel. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Some guys score and some guys don't. We got a lot that don't. — Mike Babcock

Jesus does not want us to say, dead, for, He said, all live unto Him, though they seem dead to us. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

It is always disillusioning to weigh your fish and measure your golf drives. Smart men estimate them. — Havilah Babcock

Don't let the good things of life rob you of the best things! — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Meaning I want to put words to it. I want to give it a name. I'm not okay with kissing you and holding you, being by your side for all the things a boyfriend would be there for, without it being understood in no uncertain terms that that's what I am to you. I wan us to be a couple. I want to be by your side though everything that's coming, to hold your hand when you're scared and pick you up when you're weak. I want to know that you're not going to run to some other asshole when we disagree or when I try to make sure you do what we both know is the best for you. I wan you to run to me, even if I piss you off. Because I will piss you off. Because I love you. And because you love me. And because I can't go one more day without being able to tell you that as often as it comes to mind, which is about a dozen times a minute. - Jamie Babcock — Catherine Gayle

Better to lose count while naming your blessings than to lose your blessings to counting your troubles. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Be strong! We are not here to play, to dream, to drift; We have hard work to do and loads to lift; Shun not the struggle-face it; 'tis God's gift. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

If you can help anybody even a little, be glad. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The central miscalculation of the Religious Right has been its failure to recognize the real nature of the battle, how long it's been waged, and the high price we've been willing to pay for entry into the political theater. I write as an evangelical Christian who once believed that America is a Christian nation that lost its way. I'm still an evangelical Christian, but I no longer believe that this nation, or any nation in this fallen world, can truly be 'under God. — Michael Babcock

Good habits are not made on birthdays, nor Christian character at the new year. The workshop of character is everyday life. The uneventful and commonplace hour is where the battle is lost or won. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Many a good intention dies from inattention. If, through carelessness or indolence, or selfishness, a good intention is not put into effect, we have lost an opportunity, demoralized ourselves, and stolen from the pile of possible good. To be born and not fed, is to perish. To launch a ship and neglect it is to lose it. To have a talent and bury it, is to be a "wicked and slothful servant." For in the end we shall be judged, not alone by what we have done, but by what we could have done. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

It is the "where I am" that makes heaven. The life after death might become through its very endlessness a burden to our spirits, if it were not to be filled with the infinite variety and freshness of God's love. Some have shrunk from its very infinitude, because they have not realized what God's love can make of it. Human love helps us to understand this. When we have come to love any one with all our power of affection, then there is no monotony or weariness in the days and hours we spend with them. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The root of honesty is an honest intention, the distinct and deliberate purpose to be true, to handle facts as they are, and not as we wish them to be. Facts lend themselves to manipulation. Many a butcher's hand is worth more than its weight in gold. What we want things to be, we come to see them to be; and the tailor pulls the coat and the truth into a perfect fit from his point of view. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

A day dawns, quite like other days; in it, a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Time doesn't really 'march on'. It tends to tip-toe. There's no parade. No stomping of boots to alert you to its passing. One day, you turn around and it is gone. — Heather Babcock

Life is what we are alive to. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

The only test of possession is use. The talent that is buried is not owned. The napkin and the hole in the ground are far more truly the man's property, because they are accomplishing something for him, slothful and shameful though it be. And what is a lost soul? Is it not one that God cannot use, or one that cannot use God? Trustless, prayerless, fruitless, loveless
is it not so far lost? So may a man have a soul that is lost and be dead while he lives. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock

Remember to think of your departed mother always as living, just away in another room of our Father's house. — Maltbie Davenport Babcock