Stones In The Path Are The Path Quotes & Sayings

Step by step, a path; stone by stone, a cathedral,' my great-grandfather used to say. — Phil Cousineau

God doesn't promise to remove the stones from the path, but He does promise to make them stepping-stones and not stumbling blocks. He promises to help us climb higher because of the difficulties of life. — Warren W. Wiersbe

The Outing
An outburst of anger near the road, a refusal to speak on the path, a silence in the pine woods, a silence across the old railroad bridge, an attempt to be friendly in the water, a refusal to end the argument on the flat stones, a cry of anger on the steep bank of dirt, a weeping among the bushes. — Lydia Davis

To become indignant at [people's] conduct is as foolish as to be angry with a stone because it rolls into your path. And with many people the wisest thing you can do, is to resolve to make use of those whom you cannot alter. — Arthur Schopenhauer

In the forestlichen writhes and assembles itself into signs to light my path through the deep dark north shadow; and I emerge at last onto a hillside strewn with logogrammatic stones, and scramble away from spruce tops." in the poem "Beyond the Beacon" from Terra Affirmative. — Jay Woodman

In this world some people will always throw stones in your path. It depends on you what you make from them... a wall or a bridge. — John Reyes

Geniuses were like storms or cyclones, pulling everything into their path, sticks and stones and dust. — Anne Morrow Lindbergh

I want to follow my heart. And if the path under my feet doesn't take me in the same direction, I'll cut a new path. I'll shave my obstacles down into stepping stones. — Bella Forrest

At noon, you walk across a river. It is dry, with not this much water: it is just stones and pebbles. But it rains cats and dogs in the mountains, and towards afternoon, the water descends wildly and she ravages all in its path, the madwoman. That is how death comes. Without our expecting it, and we cannot do a thing against it, brothers. — Jacques Roumain

Sometimes, when people think they're putting obstacles in your path, they're actually laying your stepping-stones. You just gotta recognize them as one and the same. — Daniel Black

In Zen, there is an old saying: The obstacle is the path. Know that a whole and happy life is not free of obstacles. Quite the contrary, a whole and happy life is riddled with obstacles-they simply become the very stepping-stones that help lift us to a new perspective. It is not what happens to us in this life that shapes us, it is how we choose to respond to what happens to us. — Dennis Merritt Jones

Grief is not an event, my dear, but a passage, a pilgrimage along a path that allows us to reflect upon the past from points of remembrance held in the soul. At times the way is filled with stones underfoot and we feel pained by our memories, yet on other days the shadows reflect our longing and those happinesses shared. — Jacqueline Winspear

God, you have paved our path
with a thousand invisible stumbling stones
and you have said: woe betide those that stumble!
You see all and you know all. Nothing happens without
your consent, so how can you hold us responsible for
our failures? Can you blame me
that I object to this? — Omar Khayyam

I climbed a path and from the top looked up-stream towards Chile. I could see the river, glinting and sliding through the bone-white cliffs with strips of emerald cultivation either side. Away from the cliffs was the desert. There was no sound but the wind, whirring through thorns and whistling through dead grass, and no other sign of life but a hawk, and a black beetle easing over white stones. — Bruce Chatwin

There are no mistakes in life, only stepping stones to the path you were meant to be on! — Heather Schwartz

You feel like quitting, like giving up. You can't understand why the road doesn't get easier, why God doesn't remove the stones and straighten the path. If God did that, you might never get to the top, because the bumps are what you can climb on. — Warren W. Wiersbe

The way grew more and more stony and this made me suspicious. If we were approaching a town we ought by now to have found a path. Instead there were these jumbled white stones that looked as if they had been combed out by an ignorant hand from the elements that make least sense. There must be stupid portions of heaven, too, and these had rolled straight down from it. I am no geologist but the word calcareous seemed to fit them. They were composed of lime and my guess was that they must have originated in a body of water. Now they were ultra-dry but filled with little caves from which cooler air was exhaled - ideal places for a siesta in the heat of noon, provided no snakes came. But the sun was in decline, trumpeting downward. The cave mouths were open and there was this coarse and clumsy gnarled white stone. — Saul Bellow

Our wretched species is so made that those who walk on the well-trodden path always throw stones at those who are showing a new road. — Voltaire

The use of drugs like mescaline may serve an appropriate purpose. Indeed, "Psychedelic" drugs have been widely used in the spiritual traditions of the world, including the Yoga of Patanjali, though they were never advertised as ultimate keys to enlightenment, merely as stepping-stones on the spiritual path. — Georg Feuerstein

Listen, nothing's better than being useful. Tell me how, at the present moment, I can be most of of use. I know it's not for you to decide that, but I'm only asking for your opinion. You tell me, and what you say I swear I'll do! Well, what is the great thought?"
"Well, to turn stones into bread. That's a great thought."
"The greatest? Yes, really, you have suggested quite a new path. Tell me, is it the greatest?"
"It's very great, my dear boy, very great, but it's not the greatest. It's great but secondary, and only great at the present time. Man will be satisfied and forget; he will say: 'I've eaten it and what am I to do now?' The question will remain open for all time. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

If you would know my path and follow in its way, then know the land about, both track and willage, in its bridge and in its drownings. Know the outcast rat-shacks, relic stones and gill-halls. Mark each path above and know the underpath below, its secret way from vault to treasure hole.' My — Alan Moore

The best teachers have showed me that things have to be done bit by bit. Nothing that means anything happens quickly
we only think it does. The motion of drawing back a bow and sending an arrow straight into a target takes only a split second, but it is a skill many years in the making. So it is with a life, anyone's life. I may list things that might be described as my accomplishments in these few pages, but they are only shadows of the larger truth, fragments separated from the whole cycle of becoming. And if I can tell an old-time story now about a man who is walking about, waudjoset ndatlokugan, a forest lodge man, alesakamigwi udlagwedewugan, it is because I spent many years walking about myself, listening to voices that came not just from the people but from animals and trees and stones. — Joseph Bruchac

Yes, if the stones that we walked on could talk, they would surely tell our story. — Nico J. Genes

Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life's work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements. — David Whyte

That impulse, too, may have been the impulse which leads a child to pick up one pebble on a path strewn with them, promising it a life of warmth and security upon the nursery mantelpiece, delighting in the sense of power and benignity which such an action confers, and believing that the heart of the stone leaps with joy when it sees itself chosen from a million like it, to enjoy this bliss instead of a life of cold and wet upon the high road. "It might so easily have been any other of the millions of stones, but it was I, I, I! — Virginia Woolf

Do you not hear me calling, white deer with no horns?
I have been changed to a hound with one red ear;
I have been in the Path of Stones and the Wood of Thorns ... — William Butler Yeats

There have been many stones on my path, which frequently made me trip and give up, however I keep telling myself this is only momentary, I will get back up. Since it's our responsibility to return back the love that we have received from so many. That is why no matter how difficult or tough it becomes I cannot let go. And that is why no matter how difficult it becomes we are able to gain strength. — Kwon Yuri

Sometimes you must do things out of love
that devastate the senses.

This wasn't easy, Elymas. I know
blindness. I know how suddenly

the specks in the stones you can't see
become something you would die for.

From the way you grope this cloud of mist
I know you're trying to imagine

the color of the stars right now,
the blue-white shine that once

ignited your hands with power,
but can conjur only

the upturned bellies of poisoned frogs,
your mother's dying lips.

Don't you know how small
this life is? Even the stars

are just the sweat Christ shakes
from his brow. When you make crooked

the path to eternity, you send your brother
to oblivion, to the buried speck

in the midnight desert stone. This time,
no magic will save you. You

will have to find your life in the dark.
Today you will have to be led by the hand. — Tania Runyan

Where I used to image you as a girl with a bag full of stones, ready to throw them at any foe who crossed her path, you have become the stone itself. You are steady and able. — Kiera Cass

The central aspect I wanted to explore was the path a person takes to get to the point where they can justify doing terrible things in the name of good. What motivations sway them? What stones laid in childhood become the foundation legacies are built on? — Kiersten White

If we constantly focus on the stones in our mortal path, we will almost surely miss the beautiful flower or cool stream provided by a loving Father who outlined our journey. — Jeffrey R. Holland

It seemed to Niels that he understood everything: the hardness in her, the dreary humility, and her coarseness, which was the bitterest drop in the whole goblet. By degrees he came to see also that his delicacy and deferential homage must oppress and irritate her, because a woman who has been hurled from the purple couch of her dreams to the pavement below will quickly resent any attempt to spread carpets over the stones which she longs to feel in all their hardness. In her first despair she is not satisfied to tread the path with her feet: she is determined to crawl it on her knees, choosing the way that is steepest and roughest. She desires no helping hand and will not lift her head--let it sink down with its own heaviness, so that she may put her face to the ground and taste the dust with her tongue! — Jens Peter Jacobsen

Do you remember the sight we saw, my soul,
that soft summer morning
round a turning in the path,
the disgusting carcass on a bed scattered with stones,
its legs in the air like a woman in need
burning its wedding poisons
like a fountain with its rhythmic sobs,
I could hear it clearly flowing with a long murmuring sound,
but I touch my body in vain to find the wound.
I am the vampire of my own heart,
one of the great outcasts condemned to eternal laughter
who can no longer smile.
Am I dead?
I must be dead. — Charles Baudelaire

There is an endless chain of cities, a circle without beginning or end, over which there breaks unrelentingly a shifting wave of laws. There is the city-jungle and the city where people live in the pillars of tall viaducts that crisscross each other in countless overpasses and underpasses, the city of sounds and nothing else, the city in the swamp, the city of smooth white balls rolling on concrete, the city comprising apartments spread across several continents, the city where sculptures fall endlessly from dark clouds and smash on the paving stones, the city where the moon's path passes through the insides of apartments. All cities are mutually the center and periphery, beginning and end, capital and colony of each other. — Michal Ajvaz

March on. Do not tarry. To go forward is to move toward perfection. March on, and fear not the thorns, or the sharp stones on life's path. — Kahlil Gibran

When life places stones in your path, be the water. A persistent drop of water will wear away even the hardest stone. — Autumn Morning Star

Sometimes what we see as wasted time is actually the training ground for what God has in store for us. The lessons we learn and the obstacles we overcome are preparation. Even the rocks you're struggling to climb over today may be the stepping-stones of tomorrow. God never wastes anything. There is great value in where he has led you. And even if you have strayed from his path at times, he's a Redeemer who can transform those mistakes into future benefits to you as well. — Holley Gerth

Where I used to imagine you as a girl with a bag full of stones, ready to throw them at any foe who crossed her path, you have become the stone itself. — Kiera Cass

Those who cannot conquer must bend the knee. They must find strength, or serve those of us who have. You are my generals. I will send you out: my hunting dogs, my wolves with iron teeth. When a city closes its gates in fear, you will destroy it. When they make roads and walls, you will cut them, pull down the stones. When a man raises a sword or bow against your men, you will hang him from a tree. Keep Karakorum in your minds as you go. This white city is the heart of the nation, but you are the right arm, the burning brand. Find me new lands, gentlemen. Cut a new path. Let their women weep a sea of tears and I will drink it all. — Conn Iggulden

If we constantly focus only on the stones in our mortal path, we will
almost surely miss the beautiful flower or cool stream provided by the
loving Father who outlined our journey. Each day can bring more joy
than sorrow when our mortal and spiritual eyes are open to God's
goodness. Joy in the gospel is not something that begins only in the
next life. It is our privilege now, this very day. We must never allow
our burdens to obscure our blessings. There will always be more
blessings than burdens
even if some days it doesn't seem so. Jesus
said, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it
more abundantly." Enjoy those blessings right now. They are yours and
always will be. — Jeffrey R. Holland

I have lived in the redness of the stones that mark a path through my blood; I am the descendant of a forgotten race, but I carry in my hands the remnants of their fire. — Mohammed Khair-Eddine

The snow here hadn't thawed. Its large, rough crystals were filled with the blue of the lake-water. But on the sunny side of the hill the snow was just beginning to melt. The ditch beside the path was full of gurgling water. The glitter of the snow, the water and the ice on the puddles was quite blinding. There was so much light, it was so intense, that they seemed almost to have to force their way through it. It disturbed them and got in their way; when they stepped on the thin film of ice over the puddles, it seemed to be light that was crunching under their feet, breaking up into thin, splinter-like rays. And it was light that was flowing down the ditch beside the path; where the path was blocked by stones, the light swelled up, foaming and gurgling. The spring sun seemed to be closer to the earth than ever. The air was cool and warm at the same time. — Vasily Grossman

I remembered as a child standing in a field where a stream crossed my path, and a yellow iris grew next a background of green rushes. The stream sang as it tumbled over the flat stones. And as a child I thought how strange it was that such things should continue after I had left them, as though when turning a corner with the stream hidden from view, a mist must fall about them, shrouding them carefully, until I should pass again. It was like this now, with the traffic and the moving people. Impossible that they should live while I was no more a part of existence. — Daphne Du Maurier

If you would have your son to walk honorably through the world, you must not attempt to clear the stones from his path, but teach him to walk firmly over them - not insist upon leading him by the hand, but let him learn to go alone. — Anne Bronte

Time heals nothing. Wounds fester and ooze. Life drags you by a rope over rocks and stones and one day you look up, look back, and see you've been used to cut a path, mark a trail. — Bob Thurber

The Shadow of the Emperor
The Hooded One
Who unmasked night
Who laid the stars like paving stones
Who rode the Thunderbolt
Down the star-cobbled path into day
Was Kane,
The Emperor's twin
Silent, as lightning is silent,
Before the thunder speaks. — Patricia A. McKillip