Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

I'm always feeling like I'm lacking wisdom. This reassurance that one can ask God for that and it will happen is certainly reassuring to me.

Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it.

Sometimes God answers our questions with questions.

My life's goal is not to write books; my life's goal is to know God better today. The neat thing about a goal like that is you can achieve it. Faith is constant; it's a relationship.

The best way to obtain truth and wisdom is not to ask from books, but to go to God in prayer, and obtain divine teaching.

. . . in the spiritual life you must practice. And the only way to practice is by trying to solve your problems with prayer. This develops your spiritual power and it also trains you to use that spiritual power in the most effective way.

Silence gives us a new outlook on everything. We need silence to be able to touch souls. The essential thing is not what we say but what God says to us and through us.

I would say to today's young minister, 'Be not afraid to give much time to solitary walks and meditation'.

I must try to be alone for part of each year...and part of each day...in order to keep my core, my center...Women must be still as the axis of a wheel in the midst of her activities. She must be the pioneer of achieving this stillness, not only for her own salvation, but for the salvation of family life, of society, perhaps even of our civilization.

The sole cause of all human misery is the inability of people to sit quietly in their rooms.

The teaching arises out of the stillness. But when I'm alone, there's only the stillness, and that is my favorite place.

Cultivating quietness is a missing discipline today...the quietness needed to nurture an inner life hid in Christ.

Solitude is the great teacher, and to learn its lessons you must pay attention to it.

I like to take every day just searching my own heart, making sure that I'm on course, and I'm doing what God wants me to do. I'm real good with not looking to the critics and looking straight ahead.

It is important from time to time to slow down, to go away by yourself, and simply be.

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.

I aspire only to silence.

For me, faith is more about aspiration than complacency - the smug satisfaction that other people find distasteful.

Beg of God the removal of envy, that God may deliver you from externals, and bestow upon you an inward occupation, which will absorb you so that your attention is not drawn away.

Your inner voice is the voice of divinity. To hear it, we need to be in solitude, even in crowded places.

I start work by spending time in personal Bible study. Because my projects center on a question in my own faith walk, I find Bible study essential. And God gives me scriptures daily that speak to the question with which I'm struggling.

I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.

Solitude is the place of purification.

One of the values of centering prayer is that you are not thinking about God during the time of centering prayer so you are giving God a chance to manifest. In centering prayer there are moments of peace that give the psyche a chance to realize that God may not be so bad after all. God has a chance to be himself for a change.

Whenever I'm confused about something, I ask God to reveal the answers to my questions, and he does.