Quaker Culture: Wealth
[In seventeenth century England], nonconformists like Quakers were barred from universities, professions and public office, and so turned to trading and industry instead. . .
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[In seventeenth century England], nonconformists like Quakers were barred from universities, professions and public office, and so turned to trading and industry instead. . .
Simplicity does not mean that all conform to uniform standards. . . The call to each is to abandon those things that clutter his life and to press toward the goal unhampered. This is true simplicity. Friends are watchful to keep themselves free from self-indulgent habits, luxurious ways of living and the bondage of fashion. . .
We do not come alone to the meeting. For the needs of those within and without the meeting sit down with us . . . in the person of our bodies which connect us with the whole of the natural creation and every exchange of breath reveals our profound dependence on the rest of nature and discloses to us our responsibility for it.
If pressure is brought upon you to lower your standard of integrity, are you prepared to resist it? Our responsibilities to God and our neighbor may involve us in taking unpopular stands. Do not let the desire to be sociable, or the fear of seeming peculiar, determine your decisions.
Britain Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (2013)
And hence came the worthy family [of Judge Thomas and Margaret Fell] to be so renowned in the nation, the fame of which spread so much among Friends. And the power and the presence of the Lord being so much there with us, it was a means to induce many, even from far, to come thither, so that at one time there would have been Friends out of five or six counties . . .
Do you see war as a giant, iniquitous, futile, unchristian system? Then hurl yourself against it, in full blindness to the seeming impossibility of the task. . . There are no impossibles to those who, in supreme dedication, are rooted deep in the Eternal Love.
-- Thomas Kelly (1941)
The art of exercising the faculty of thinking, and reflecting upon every object that is seen, ought to constitute a material branch of a good education . . .
CECILIA: How comes it, Sophia, that I am so often idle, and my thoughts wander from what I am about, when I really intend to be good?
Instead of wanting to go to heaven, the practical mystic wants heaven to come down to earth.
The ability to live by fitting into Nature rather then a human hierarchy is still the foundation of freedom, because freedom is personal co-creativity that is born of harmonious wholeness.
The many words and phrases Friends use for the divine life and power at the heart of the universe reflect the diversity of beliefs and variety of experiences among us. What one Friend may understand as the Inward Christ, another Friend may understand as the Ground of Being.
[We] have been enabled to see a splendid vision of what human unity is, and of what human fellowship may be, and have of necessity been filled with a profound sense of the evil of violating this fellowship. This vision has brought us a renewed faith in the power of spiritual forces to build the structure of humanity, and to redeem it from error and wrong. . .
