Quaker Culture

All growth is silent. The heavenly spheres move in silence. Light spies its way in silence.

          – Joel Bean (1911)

[The] Lord opened my spirit . . . [and] gave me the certain and sensible feeling of the pure, which had been with me from the beginning . . . such an inward demonstration and feeling of the seed of life, that I cried out in my spirit, “. . . there is not another, there never was another.”

– Isaac Penington (1667)

[When the] servant [of God] . . . is commanded to smite the rock, [he should] do so, and when to speak calmly to do so. Let the consequence be as it may. And I believe many precious gifts have been greatly marred and some lost by endeavoring to please.

          – Elias Hicks (1823)

Nature is not simply an organic body like a clock, which has no vital principle of motion in it; but it is a living body which has life and perception, which are much more exalted than a mere mechanism or a mechanical motion.

          – Anne Conway (1690)

And know the life of God in one another, and the power of God in one another . . . Mind that which is eternal, which gathers your hearts together up to the Lord, and lets you see that ye are written in one another’s hearts; meet together everywhere.

– George Fox (1653)

[I] feel that in my own case, it may be best to share the occasional gleam with the multitude, rather than stand in the blaze on the mountain-top with the elect.

          – Corder Catchpool (1934)

The insight at the heart of nonviolence is that we live in a tragic gap – a gap between the way things are and the way we know they might be. It is a gap that never has been and never will be closed. If we want to live nonviolent lives, we must learn to stand in the tragic gap, faithfully holding the tension between reality and possibility in hopes of being opened to a third way.

[We] must remember that there is one worse thing than failure to practice what we profess, and that is to water down our professions to match our practice.

– Friends World Conference (1952)

Between the relinquished past and the untrodden future stands this holy Now . . . In the Now we are at home at last. The fretful winds of time are stilled, the nostalgic longings of this heaven-born earth-traveler come to rest. For the one-dimensional ribbon of time has loosed its hold. It has by no means disappeared. We live within time, within the one-dimensional ribbon.