Stedman Quotes & Sayings

improbable to Tom that such endless space could exist — M.L. Stedman

Sometimes life turns out hard, Isabel. Sometimes it just bites right through you. And sometimes, just when you think it's done its worst, it comes back and takes another chunk. — M.L. Stedman

Awkward, like when a mad aunt starts up about Jesus at the dinner table. As Septimus showed him to the door, the sergeant replaced his hat and said quietly, "A cruel piece of mischief-making, looks like. I reckon it's about time to bury the hatchet against Fritz. All a filthy business, but there's no need for pranks like this. I'd keep it under your hat, the note. Don't want to encourage copycats." He shook hands with Septimus and made his way up the long, gum-lined drive. Back in his study, Septimus put a hand on Hannah's shoulder. "Come on, girlie, chin up. Mustn't let this get the better of you." "But — M.L. Stedman

It is a luxury to do something that serves no practical purpose: the luxury of civilization. — M.L. Stedman

Freedom is about a way of thinking. Freedom is about understanding that you can do anything that you want and freedom is about being able to take information and education and make it relevant to your own growth every single day. Freedom is not staying in the box. Freedom is not doing what other people want you to do. — Stedman Graham

Worth, courage, honor, these indeed
Your sustenance and birthright are. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

God is never impressed with the phony. He has no time or patience for the false; God deals only with truth. He says that to trust His Word as a plain statement of truth, ignoring all the mocking taunts of those who think they know better, will not be an easy path but it will be an absolutely sure one. That is what Hebrews 11 says to us. — Ray C. Stedman

In his sufferings, Job has learned that God is greater than his theology. This is a truth we all need to learn. We tend to think we know how God will act in every situation. And the moment we have God neatly confined in our little theological box. He does something surprising! — Ray C. Stedman

History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. — M.L. Stedman

We make the best choices when we have invested all of our energies, our hearts, and our souls into a course of action that leads to the accomplishment of goals we are passionate about. — Stedman Graham

Akward, like when a mad aunt starts up about Jesus at the dinner table. As Septimus showed him to the door, the sergeant replaced his hat and said quietly, "A cruel piece of mischief-making, looks like. I reckon it's about time to bury the hatchet against Fritz. All a filthy business, but there's no need for pranks like this. I'd keep it under your hat, the note. Don't want to encourage copycats." He shook hands with Septimus and made his way up the long, gum-lined drive. Back in his study, Septimus put a hand on Hannah's shoulder. "Come on, girlie, chin up. Mustn't let this get the better of you. — M.L. Stedman

Sports isn't just a part of life. It's not life itself. — Stedman Graham

You know, and younger people today, you know, they may not have Social Security. They may not have a pension. They may have 17 different jobs. And so they have to be - they have to, you know, establish somewhat of an ownership, you know, mentality. — Stedman Graham

He is embraced by nature, which is waiting, ultimately, to receive him, to re-organize his atoms into another shape. — M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

All you need is patience and a bit of nous. — M.L. Stedman

What your wife's going to say you did or didn't do, if — M.L. Stedman

But how? How can you just get over these things, darling? ... You've had so much strife but you're always happy. How do you do it?'
'I choose to ... I can leave myself to rot in the past, spend my time hating people for what happened, like my father did, or I can forgive and forget.'
'But it's not that easy.'
He smiled that Frank smile. 'Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... I would have to make a list, a very, very long list and make sure I hated the people on it the right amount. That I did a proper job of hating, too: very Teutonic! No' - his voice became sober- 'we always have a choice. All of us.' p.323 — M.L. Stedman

And whenever you encounter a problem, no matter how insurmountable it might seem, there is one simple response that should be ingrained in your behavior: Never give up. — Stedman Graham

Most people are defined by their titles, their cars, their house, where they came from, their color, their race, their religion. And so it's up to you to take control of your own life and define you. As long as you understand who you are and you have a solid foundation of understanding what your talents are, what your skills are. — Stedman Graham

Genius does not need a special language; it uses newly whatever tongue it finds. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

The imagination never dies. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

No one ever has or ever will travel quite the same path on earth ... — M.L. Stedman

Your family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere. — M.L. Stedman

The Christian is more than an empty vessel. He has ... Someone within. We have a treasure in the earthen vessel, and not only a treasure - a transcendent power! That is humanity as God intended it to be. The vessel is not much in itself, but it holds an inestimable treasure, beyond price, and a transcendent power, greater than any other power known to men. — Ray Stedman

I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past. She — M.L. Stedman

Here in a place where there's just wind an waves and light, and the intricate machinery that keeps the flame burning and the lantern turning. Always turning. Always looking over its shoulder — M.L. Stedman

I was born to meet you, Izz. I reckon that's what I was put here for, — M.L. Stedman

The town draws a veil over certain events. This is a small community where everyone knows that sometimes the contract to forget is as important as any promise to remember. Children can grow up having no knowledge of the indiscretion of their father in his youth or the illegitimate sibling who lives fifty miles away and bears another man's name. History is that which is agreed upon by mutual consent. That's how life goes on; protected by the silence that anaesthetises shame. — M.L. Stedman

The oceans never stop ... the wind never finishes. Sometimes it disappears, but only to gather momentum from somewhere else, returning to fling itself at the island ... Existence here is on the scale of giants. Time is in the millions of years; rocks which from a distance look like dice cast against the shore are boulders hundreds of feet wide, licked round by millennia ... — M.L. Stedman

You know and we have about 60 to 70 percent black men in prison today and it's because of the negativity they have in their own hearts. — Stedman Graham

Fashion is a potency in art, making it hard to judge between the temporary and the lasting. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island. — M.L. Stedman

between words. "It's coming! The baby's coming. — M.L. Stedman

You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. — M.L. Stedman

Love's what children do. — M.L. Stedman

You don't think ahead in years or months: you think about this hour, and maybe the next. Anything else is speculation. — M.L. Stedman

A critic must accept what is best in a poet, and thus become his best encourager. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

Later still, the war memorials would sprout from the earth, dwelling not on the loss, but on what the loss had won, and what a fine thing it was to be victorious. "Victorious and dead," some muttered, "is a poor sort of victory. — M.L. Stedman

Never be sorry for smiling! — M.L. Stedman

To get where we want to go in life, we have to keep at it. We have to create a vision, make choices based on what moves us most swiftly toward our goals, and go after them with determination and single-mindedness. — Stedman Graham

Put right the things you can put right today. — M.L. Stedman

People who let events and circumstances dictate their lives are living reactively. That means that they don't act on life, they only react to it. — Stedman Graham

But a sliver of un-crossable distance had slipped between them; an invisible, wisp-thin no man's land. — M.L. Stedman

If a lighthouse looks like it's in a different place, it's not the lighthouse that's moved. — M.L. Stedman

Sometimes it's good to leave the past in the past. — M.L. Stedman

Give us a man of God's own mould
Born to marshall his fellow-men;
One whose fame is not bought and sold
At the stroke of a politician's pen.
Give us the man of thousands ten,
Fit to do as well as to plan;
Give us a rallying-cry, and then
Abraham Lincoln, give us a Man. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

So many men who had dodged death over there now seemed addicted to its lure. — M.L. Stedman

True Christianity is to manifest genuinely Christ-like behavior by dependence on the working of the Spirit of God within. — Ray Stedman

It's a weak faith that only serves God in times of blessing. The book of Job teaches us that true faith, genuine faith, great faith is revealed only when we serve and trust God in the hard times, the times of suffering, loss, and opposition. That's the kind of faith that makes the world sit up and take notice. — Ray Stedman

Natural emotion is the soul of poetry, as melody is of music; the same faults are engendered by over-study of either art; there is a lack of sincerity, of irresistible impulse in both the poet and the, composer. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

I shouldn't have spoken like that.'
'People do, sometimes. People who've had less to contend with than you. We're not always in full control of our actions. — M.L. Stedman

A happy people I call them still, whose peace and genuine morals have not been contaminated with European vices; and whose errorsare only the errors of ignorance, and not the rooted depravity of a pretended civilization, and a spurious and mock Christianity. — John Gabriel Stedman

Izz, I've learned the hard way that to have any kind of a future you've got to give up hope of ever changing your past. — M.L. Stedman

The Psalms are much more than poetry. Many of them bear the title, Maskil, or teaching psalm. They are thus intended to instruct the mind as well as to encourage the heart. They are designed not only to reflect a mood, but to show us also how to handle that mood; how to escape from depression or how to balance exaltation with wisdom. — Ray Stedman

That's how life goes on - protected by the silence that anesthetizes shame. — M.L. Stedman

Do your heart and head keep pace? When does hoary Love expire, When do frosts put out the fire? Can its embers burn below All that chill December snow? — Edmund Clarence Stedman

A primary purpose for setting goals is to get you moving in the right direction. When you set goals, you have to keep them always in mind. — Stedman Graham

Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them back. She began to feel an urgency, a need to seize an opportunity. Before anyone else did. — M.L. Stedman

Know that you have always been beloved. — M.L. Stedman

I warn you, though, he's not the happiest corpse in the morgue. Not much of a talker, Neville Whittnish. — M.L. Stedman

The idea of being able to serve as an example, based upon how to process, how to think, how to realize our own dreams, we can pass that down to our children. — Stedman Graham

Or I can forgive and forget ... Oh, but my treasure, it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things ... we always have a choice. — M.L. Stedman

There are times when the ocean is not the ocean - not blue, not even water, but some violent explosion of energy and danger: ferocity on a scale only gods can summon. It hurls itself at the island, sending spray right over the top of the lighthouse, biting pieces off the cliff. And the sound is a roaring of a beast whose anger knows no limits. Those are the nights the light is needed most. — M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

Humans withdraw to their homes, and surrender the night to the creatures that own it: the crickets, the owls, the snakes. A world that hasn't changed for hundreds of thousands of years wakes up, and carries on as if the daylight and the humans and the changes to the landscape have all been an illusion. — M.L. Stedman

When you have a sense of your own identity and a vision of where you want to go in your life, you then have the basis for reaching out to the world and going after your dreams for a better life. — Stedman Graham

So while you're an athlete, and you have that platform, what you want to be able to do is make it work for you as much as possible, because there's going to be life after sports. — Stedman Graham

it, she decided to experiment. — M.L. Stedman

This focusing outward ... painful as it was, saved her from a more intolerable examination. — M.L. Stedman

If you did the same thing you did yesterday as you did today as you will do tomorrow, what have you done? The same thing. — Stedman Graham

Love's bigger than rule books. — M.L. Stedman

The only thing we can do is love that little girl as much as she deserves. And never, never hurt her! — M.L. Stedman

A goblin thought jumps onto her shouder: what's the point of tomorrow? — M.L. Stedman

God does not want a church filled with white-robed saints. He does not want a church filled with theological authorities or cultured clergyman. He wants a church filled with ordinary men and women who exemplify the extraordinary integrity, temperament, wholeness, compassion, individuality, boldness, righteousness, earnestness, love, forgiveness, selflessness, and faithfulness of Jesus Christ! — Ray Stedman

Is there a rarer being,
Is there a fairer sphere
Where the strong are not unseeing,
And the harvests are not sere;
Where, ere the seasons dwindle
They yield their due return;
Where the lamps of knowledge kindle
While the flames of youth still burn? — Edmund Clarence Stedman

As Tom walked away, every step more awful, Lucy pursued him, arms still outstretched. 'Dadda, wait for Lulu,' she begged, wounded and confused. When she tripped and fell face down on the gravel, letting out a scream, Tom could not go on, and spun around, breaking free of the policeman's grip.
'Lulu!'
He scooped her up and kissed her scratched chin.
'Lucy, Lucy, Lucy, Lucy,' he murmured, his lips brushing her cheek.
'You're all right, little one. You'll be all right.'
Vernon Knuckey looked at the ground and cleared his throat.
Tom said, 'Sweetheart, I have to go away now. I hope - ' He stopped. He looked into her eyes and he stroked her hair, finally kissing her.
'Goodbye, littlie. — M.L. Stedman

Her bond with the couple who raised her is fierce and beyond questioning. She cannot name the sensation of losing them as grief. She has no word for longing or despair. — M.L. Stedman

I wasn't exactly thrilled about it being a Lutheran organization, but when you live in Minnesota - land of lutefisk and home to no less than seven Lutheran colleges and four Lutheran seminaries - Lutherans are kind of inescapable. — Chris Stedman

Men are egotists, and not all tolerant of one man's selfhood; they do not always deem the amities elective. — Edmund Clarence Stedman

Then in 1914 things changed. Partageuse found that it too had something the world wanted. Men. Young men. Fit men. Men who had spent their lives swinging an ax or holding a plow and living it hard. Men who were the prime cut to be sacrificed on tactical altars a hemisphere away. — M.L. Stedman

They tried hard to take comfort from the fact that the boys hadn't died in vain: they had been part of a magnificent struggle for right. And there were moments where they could believe that and swallow down the angry, desperate screech that wanted to scrape its way out of their gullets like out of a mother bird. — M.L. Stedman

When everybody has access to an avalanche of information, becoming a master thinker is very important in your life-long security. — Stedman Graham

Then he remembered Ralph's words
no point in fighting your war over and over until you get it right. — M.L. Stedman

He was a practical man: give him a sensitive technical instrument, and he could maintain it; something broken, and he could mend it, meditatively, efficiently. But confronted by his grieving wife, he felt useless. — M.L. Stedman

Tom isn't one of the men whose legs trailed by a hank of sinews, or whose guts cascaded from their casing like slithering eels. Nor were his lungs turned to glue or his brains to stodge by the gas. But he's scarred all the same having to live in the same skin as the man who did the things that needed to be done back then. He carries that other shadow, which is cast inward. — M.L. Stedman

People who consider themselves victims of their circumstances will always remain victims unless they develop a greater vision for their lives. — Stedman Graham

A lighthouse is for others; powerless to illuminate the space closest to it. — M.L. Stedman

He bit the narrow end of the flower and sucked the droplet of nectar from its base. 'You only taste it for a second. But it's worth it.' page 333 — M.L. Stedman

Poetry is an art, the easiest to dabble in, but the hardest to reach true excellence. — J. G. Stedman

excoriated and burned, mapped and measured and meted — M.L. Stedman

Even though everything in the past twenty-four hours had been leading to this, even though it was a fear Isabel had harboured from the day she had first laid eyes on Lucy as a baby, still, the moment ripped through her.
'Please!' she pleaded through tears.
'Have some pity!'
Her voice reverberated around the bare walls.
'Don't take my baby away!'
As the girl was wrenched from her screaming, Isabel fainted onto the stone floor with a resounding crack. — M.L. Stedman

if a parent loses a child, there was no special label for their grief. They were still just a mother or a father, even if they no longer had a son or daughter. That seemed odd. — M.L. Stedman

Your trench. The lice were "chats," the food was — M.L. Stedman

Even Reverend Norkells urged her to spend less time in the stony darkness of the church and to "look for Christ in the life around her. — M.L. Stedman

Perhaps when it comes to it, no one is just the worst thing they ever did. — M.L. Stedman

Such indeed is the superior longevity of the fair females of Surinam, compared to that of the males (owing chiefly, as I said, to their excesses of all sorts) that I have frequently known wives who have buried four husbands, but never met a man in this country who had survived two wives. — John Gabriel Stedman

Once a child gets into your heart, there's no right or wrong about it. — M.L. Stedman

Above the clouds I lift my wing
To hear the bells of Heaven ring;
Some of their music, though my fights be wild,
To Earth I bring;
Then let me soar and sing! — Edmund Clarence Stedman

To see lonely, selfish, empty individuals transformed slowly but surely into warm, loving, wholesome, and happy people is to become aware of why Paul describes Christ as 'unsearchable riches'. — Ray Stedman

I can forgive and forget ... it is so much less exhausting. You only have to forgive once. To resent, you have to do it all day, every day. You have to keep remembering all the bad things. — M. L. Stedman - The Light Between Oceans

Understand who you are, so that you can be the same, whether you're talking to a homeless person or the president of the United States. You're the same person. — Stedman Graham