Martin E. Marty Quotes

Be assured that Christianity is something more than forms and creeds and ceremonies: there is life, and power, and reality, in our holy faith.

One must not let oneself be overwhelmed by sadness.

You know, I think we Indians are afraid to show and celebrate our happiness, lest things change around. But I feel that it's okay to be sad and okay to show when you are happy.

You know, God has a plan for me, and I'm going to follow in his footsteps and just rejoice and be happy.

I, I don't think anybody's continually happy, uh, except idiots, you know. You know, you have to have little moments of depression.

What is happiness other than a negotiation between reality and your dreams? It's understanding that you give up something for something else. I feel like that's been how I've been trying to be happy, although in my DNA there's more of a depressed person.

Hold the sadness and pain of samsara [suffering, confusion] in your heart and at the same time the power and vision of the Great Eastern Sun [fundamental awake human nature]. Then the warrior [brave enough to look at & work with reality] can make a proper cup of tea.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.

No reason to be angry. Anger just distracts from the all-encompassing sadness.

And I believe happiness is the exact opposite of sadness, bitterness, and hatred: happiness should remain unexamined as long as possible.

I could see no reason for being sad. It´s just that it makes me unhappy not to feel happy.

Serve God joyfully. Let there be no sadness in your life: the only true sorrow is sin.

It is so hard to learn to put sadness in perspective so hard to understand that it is a feeling that comes in degrees, it can be a candle burning gently and harmlessly in your home, or it can be a full-fledged forest fire that destroy almost everything and is controlled by almost nothing. It can also be so much in-between

I try to look at life carefully and reproduce life the way life is. It's a question of looking carefully at how it is. In life, you don't have total happiness. People always say that. But you don't have total sadness either, no matter what situation you are living in.

You need a reason to be sad. You don't need a reason to be happy.

There's no way for them to take away my sadness, but they can make sure I am not empty of all the other feelings.

Unless devotion is given to the thing which must prove false in the end, the thing that is true in the end cannot enter.

Ten times must you laugh during the day, and be cheerful; otherwise your stomach, the father of affliction, will disturb you in the night.

I don't go to church so much, the way my life is, but it's in me every day.

God's law is our pleasure when the God of the law is our God.

Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed.

For the rational, psychologically healthy man, the desire for pleasure is the desire to celebrate his control over reality. For the neurotic, the desire for pleasure is the desire to escape from reality.

That is my work, to transform your life from a sad affair into a celebration.

Love is not a higher quality than truth.

She felt so old, so worn out, so far away from the best moments of her life that she even yearned for those that she remembered as the worst… Her heart of compressed ash, which had resisted the most telling blows of daily reality without strain, fell apart with the first waves of nostalgia. The need to feel sad was becoming a vice as the years eroded her. She became human in her solitude.