Quotes
Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out.
Marge Piercy
Whether it's the best of times or the worst of times, it's the only time we've got.
Art Buchwald
There is clearly much left to be done, and whatever else we are going to do, we had better get on with it.
Rosalynn Carter
How would your life have been different if, when growing up, the divine had been imaged as female?
Rev. Shirley A Ranck
The wonder of being together, so close yet so apart—
Each hidden in our own secret chamber,
Each listening, each trying to speak—
Yet none fully understanding, none fully understood.
Sophia Lyon Fahs
DAILY SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: Don't worry about what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
Robert Thurman
Nobody can make you feel inferior without your permission.
Eleanor Roosevelt
I want future generations to know there was a time when people believed peace, love, equality and freedom were possible, when trusting ourselves and others was natural and easy, when it was exciting to explore the boundaries of our minds and bodies, when little was forbidden except saying that anything was impossible.
Rev. Dr. Dorothy May Emerson
Sea Change: The Unfinished Agenda of the 1960s
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it is dark.
Zen proverb
For years I've been stringing and unstringing my instrument while the song I have come to sing remains unsung.
Rabindranath Tagore
A nation is not conquered until it hears its women are on the ground. Then it's finished, no matter how brave its warriors or how strong their weapons.
Cheyenne Proverb
I would suggest to you that we need to imagine ourselves as the Grandmother Galaxy. That’s right! A galaxy full of wise and powerful women!
Rev. Shirley A. Ranck
We know ourselves to be made from this earth. We know this earth is made from our bodies. For we see ourselves. And we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.
Susan Griffin
Something happens in the company of women. Souls open like the sun, rising between blue mountains.
Rebecca Rajasser
I was a child of the soil who often wandered alone in the woodland, amidst the growing grain, comfortable with solitude. A sense of euphoria comes over me as I see her in my mind’s eye and relive her yearning to be intertwined in the forces of life. She was, as I believe each small child potentially is, a feminist. She cares for all of life – for the cosmos as she perceived it.
Lucile Longview, initiator of the 1977 UU Women and Religion Resolution
Be bold. If you're going to make an error, make a doozey, and don't be afraid to hit the ball.
Billie Jean King
Filling a bookcase is like gathering a social circle.
May Lamberton Becker
We don't want a piece of the pie - it's still a patriarchal pie.
We want to change the recipe.
Rosemary Matson
Gardening is not a rational act. What matters is the immersion of the hands in the earth, that ancient ceremony of which the Pope kissing the tarmac is merely a pallid vestigial remnant. In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.
Margaret Atwood
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.
Shakespeare
When I dare to be powerful - to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.
Audre Lorde
There is a conspiracy afoot!!! A conspiracy of love and empowerment. Networks of people interested in maximizing human potential and transforming the human experience are reaching for a new kind of world consciousness.
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.
Rev. Theodore Parker
DAILY SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: We have 3 days to live and two of them are gone.
Sufi saying
When the ax comes into the forest, the trees, upon seeing its wooden handle, say "Look, one of us."
Hasidic saying
Society should be directed by “the divine obligation of love and mutual aid between human beings.”
Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
Anne Sexton
I have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.
Adrienne Rich
It is good to realize that if love and peace can prevail on earth, and if we can teach our children to honor nature's gifts, the joys and beauties of the outdoors will be here forever.
Jimmy Carter
I pray you too will take care of your Mother Earth where you live and the water that surrounds you and the water within you.
Grandmother Agnes Baker Pilgrim
one of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers
There are two ways of spreading light - to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.
Edith Wharton
The women of today are the thoughts of their mothers and grandmothers, embodied and made alive. They are active, capable, determined and bound to win. They have one-thousand generations back of them... Millions of women dead and gone are speaking through us today
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. - Declaration of Sentiments, First Women's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York , July 19-20, 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902)
Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.
Anais Nin
Do not allow the Church or State to govern your thought or dictate your judgment.
We came to know the beauty and responsibility of the Circle and saw firsthand how the gifts blossomed when shared with honorable intentions and loving hearts.
Don't think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter, its roots are down there riotous.
Rumi
If men can run the world, why can't they stop wearing neckties? How intelligent is it to start the day by tying a little noose around your neck?
Linda Ellerbee
DAILY SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: Say "yes" when nobody asked.
Lao proverb
Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do on a rainy afternoon.
Susan Ertz
...a lot of people think survival is about being the toughest or the most amoral, or having the most stuff. Yet as we’ve seen from actual accounts of people surviving disasters, the people who do best are the ones who adapt, and cooperate.
NK Jemisin
Light needs much dark in order to dazzle.
Edmond Jab
A viable neighborhood is a community: and a viable community is made up of neighbors who cherish and protect what they have in common.
Wendell Berry
How do we as women, like “a river of birds in migration” band together to find a still point of balance within ourselves to maintain hope and act skillfully in the world? How can we be wise?
Melody Lee
Becoming Women of Wisdom: Marking the Passage into the Crone Years
Feminism and the women's movement generally constitutes a transforming vision that will change the very nature of the world in which we live ...
UUA Women & Religion Committee Report, June 1983
...the words black and dark don’t need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness. The words white and light don’t need to be destroyed or ignored, only balanced and reclaimed in their wholeness. Imagine a world that has only light—or dark. We need both. Dark and light. Light and dark.
Jacqui James
I believe we model our actions and thoughts on the imagery we see in art, novels, movies and religions.
Liz Fisher, author of Rise Up and Call her Name curriculum
SPIRITUAL PRACTICE: "Today, really listen to the person who is with you right now, whoever that may be, a client, a friend, a customer. They are the most important person in your world at this precise moment. And if you listen, really listen, in your rapt attention, they may say something YOU really need to hear."
Veronica Hay
I go to the ocean to calm down, to reconnect with the creator, to just be happy.
Nnedi Okorafor
Feminist Theology draws, above all, on women’s experience. The woman’s experience referred to is any and every woman’s experience of patriarchy itself in the ways we have been erased, subsumed and denied powerful sense of empowerment.
Lucile Longview, initiator of the 1977 UU Women and Religion Resolution
Whatever you believe you can do, begin it; boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
Goethe
Feminist Theology arises as a critique of the patriarchal bias of traditional theology.
Rosemary Radford Reuther