Miroslav Volf Quotes

#1. Faith is the way we as receivers relate appropriately to God as the giver. It is empty hands held open for God to fill. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#2. To affirm that God is God is to want to live in a particular way. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#3. Notice that, in making ourselves available, we are not doing God any favors. We give ourselves for God's use to benefit creation, not to benefit God. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#4. This is a book about worshiping the true God and letting the true God act in us. It tells us as plainly as possible that the true God is a God who cannot stop giving and forgiving, and that our knowledge of this true God is utterly bound up with our willingness to receive from the hand of God the liberty to give and forgive. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#5. There is no space in which worship should not take place, no time when it should not occur, and no activity through which it should not happen. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#6. God's gifts aim at making us into generous givers, not just fortunate receivers. God gives so that we, in human measure, can be givers too. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#7. There is no more effective way to radicalize American Muslim youth than for political leaders to make public displays of prejudice against all Muslims. Suspicion will undermine their sense of identification with America and alienate some from both the culture and from politics. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#8. The goal of pursuit of justice must not simply be that justice happens but that reconciliation also happens. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#9. The true God gives so we can become joyful givers and not just self-absorbed receivers. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#10. Some of the worst violence in the world today between estranged religious and ethnic groups happens not on the battlefields. It happens smack in the middle of living rooms and between people who share a lot, who have a lot in common. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#11. If I say, 'I forgive you,' I have implicitly said you have done something wrong to me. But what forgiveness is at its heart is both saying that justice has been violated and not letting that violation count against the offender. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#12. If somebody postulates the existence of more than one god, I would have to say we don't worship the same god. If somebody says that God is basically one with the world, I would also have to say we don't worship the same god. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#13. Unaware that our culture has subverted our faith, we lose a place from which to judge our own culture #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#14. Engagement is not a matter of either speaking or doing; not a matter of either offering a compelling intellectual vision or embodying a set of alternative practices; not a matter of either merely making manifest the richness and depth of interior life or merely working to change the institutions of society; not a matter of either only displaying alternative politics as gathered in Eucharistic celebrations or merely working for change as the dispersed people of God. It is all these things and more. The whole person in all aspects of her life is engaged in fostering human flourishing and serving the common good. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#15. We know it is good to receive, and we have been blessed by receiving not only as children, but also as adults. Yet Jesus taught that it is more blessed to give than to receive (Acts 20:35), and part of growing up is learning the art of giving. If we fail to learn this art, we will live unfulfilled lives, and in the end, chains of bondage will replace the bonds that keep our communities together. If we just keep taking or even trading, we will squander ourselves. If we give, we will regain ourselves as fulfilled individuals and flourishing communities. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#16. Does a person have a right to change his or her own religion? This is a fundamental human right, just like a right to freedom of speech. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#17. We lead our lives well when we love God with our whole being and when we love neighbors as we (properly) love ourselves. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#18. Every word and every deed, every thought and every gesture, even the simple act of paying attention can be a gift and therefore an echo of God's life in us. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#19. By embracing the "outcast," Jesus underscored the "sinfulness" of the persons and systems that cast them out. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#20. After my engagement with Muslim friends, I pray more than I used to pray. My prayer life has been enriched by my encounter with some Muslims, encouraged by their devotion and also enriched by the ways in which they pray. Have I compromised in this way at all? No, to the contrary, I've gone deeper in my faith and I think my love for God has been deepened and made more intelligent in a sense, more rich by that very encounter. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#21. If it is true that the dual command of love is the common ground of the two faiths, the consequences are momentous. We no longer have to say, "The deeper your faith, the more you will be at odds with others!" To the contrary, we must say, "The deeper your faith, the more you will live in harmony with others!" A deep faith no longer leads to clashes; it fosters peaceful coexistence. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#22. G. K. Chesterton famously quipped that "those who marry the spirit of the age will find themselves widows in the next. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#23. If you take the 'love your enemy' out of Christianity, you've 'unChristianed' the Christian faith. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#24. Because the Christian God is not a lonely God, but rather a communion of three persons, faith leads human beings into the divine communion. One cannot, however, have a self-enclosed communion with the Triune God- a "foursome," as it were
for the Christian God is not a private deity. Communion with this God is at once also communion with those others who have entrusted themselves in faith to the same God. Hence one and the same act of faith places a person into a new relationship both with God and with all others who stand in communion with God. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#25. To give to God is to take from God's right hand and put that very thing back into God's left hand. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#26. Christians believe that there will be a Judgment Day at the end. And it is my belief that on that day justice will be done and there will be a reconciliation between those who have profoundly injured one another takes place. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#27. The sufferings of Christ on the cross are not just his sufferings; they are "the sufferings of the poor and weak, which Jesus shares in his own body and in his own soul, in solidarity with them" (Moltmann 1992, 130). And since God was in Christ, "through his passion Christ brings into the passion history of this world the eternal fellowship of God and divine justice and righteousness that creates life" (131). On the cross, Christ both "identifies God with the victims of violence" and identifies "the victims with God, so that they are put under God's protection and with him are given the rights of which they have been deprived #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#28. Whatever the reasons, when forgiveness happens it is always a miracle of grace. The obstacles in its way are immense #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#29. The crucial question, therefore, is not how to accomplish the final reconciliation. That messianic problem ought not to be taken out of God's hands. The only thing worse than the failure of some modern grand narratives of emancipation would have been their success! Merely by trying to accomplish the messianic task, the have already done too much of the work of the antichrist. In demasking anti-messianic projects that offer universal salvation, Lyotard helps us ask the right kind of question, which is not how to achieve the final reconciliation, but what resources we need to live in peace in the absence of the final reconciliation. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#30. If we can exit a relationship, pressure to reconcile lessens; if we must live with those who have wronged us, we are pushed to reconcile. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#31. We will not "forget" so as to be able to rejoice; we will rejoice and therefore let those memories (of wrongs suffered) slip out of our minds! #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#32. Some Jews and Muslims accuse Christians of being idolatrous for believing in the Trinity. My response to both groups is that they fundamentally misunderstand the Christian understanding of the Trinity. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#33. When we forget that, we unwittingly reduce God's ways to our ways and God's thoughts to our thoughts. Our hearts become factories of idols in which we fashion and refashion God to fit our needs and desires. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#34. I don't think we need to agree with anyone in order to love the person. The command for Christians to love the other person, to be benevolent and beneficent toward them, is independent of what the other believes. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#35. Love properly understood is God - the font of all creation and the ultimate goal of all desires; God properly understood is love. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#36. Will Christians turn once again toward an approach that imposes its will on the rest of society? By doing so we would betray our founder, who resisted a temptation to authority over "all the kingdoms of the world," and who died a martyr at the hands of a powerful state. In the words of Miroslav Volf, "Imposition stands starkly at odds with the basic character of the Christian faith, which is at its heart about self-giving - God's self-giving and human self-giving - and not about self-imposing." Even #Quote by Philip Yancey

#37. To remember a wrongdoing is to struggle against it. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#38. If no one remembers a misdeed or names it publically, it remains invisible. To the observer, its victim is not a victim and its perpetrator is not a perpetrator; both are misperceived because the suffering of the one and the violence of the other go unseen. A double injustice occurs-the first when the original deed is done and the second when it disappears. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#39. If forgiveness does take place it will be but an echo of the forgiveness granted by the just and loving God-- the only forgiveness that ultimately matters, because, though we must forgive, in a very real sense no one can either forgive or retain sins 'but God alone. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#40. Slowly and imperceptibly, the one true God begins acquiring the features of the gods of this world. For instance, our God simply gratifies our desires rather than reshaping them in accordance with the beauty of God's own character. Our God then kills enemies rather than dying on their behalf as God did in Jesus Christ. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#41. To live with integrity, it is important to know what's right and what's wrong, to be educated morally. However, merely KNOWING is not enough. Virtuous character matters more than moral knowledge. The reason is simple: like the self-confessing apostle Paul in Romans 7, most of those who do wrong know what's right but find themselves irresistibly attracted to its opposite. Faith idles when character shrivels #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#42. God is the utterly loving giver. God doesn't just love. God is love. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#43. The practice of non-violence requires a belief in divine vengeance. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#44. Second, as Luther stated, because God's love isn't caused by its object, it can love those who are not lovable, "sinners, evil persons, fools, and weaklings in order to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong". Luther concluded, "rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good". #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#45. If we don't learn to live with one another we will not live. We will either love each other as neighbors or we won't be. I believe that it is an insult to me as a Christian to say that I cannot love as neighbor somebody who thinks differently than I do. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#46. For any victim, particularly us Americans, it is difficult to see ourselves through the eyes of our offender. But for any victim it is the most salutary thing to do. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#47. In my opinion, I'm quite certain that Dr. Miroslav Volf most always means simply what he says and says exactly what he means and he no more speaks in 'code' than I do".

~R. Alan Woods [2012] #Quote by R. Alan Woods

#48. In a way, fraud in business is no different from infidelity in marriage or plagiarism in scholarly work. Even people committed to high moral standards succumb. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#49. For Christians, faith is a precious good, the most valuable personal and social resource. When it is left untapped, the common good suffers - not just the particular interests of Christians. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#50. Sometimes when I observe contemporary U.S. culture, with its hard fronts and nasty culture wars, I have a strange sense that I've seen something like it before - in the Communist and semitotalitarian state in which I grew up. The issues and positions are very different, but the spirit is strangely familiar. In all public discussion, there was a party line that people had to toe; if you diverged, you were deemed disloyal and suspected of betraying the cause. I sense a similar spirit today among both progressives and conservatives in the United States when it comes to many hot-button issues, including Islam. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#51. For many Americans, Osama bin Laden is the paradigmatic Muslim, an absurd conviction for anyone who has lived with Muslims. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#52. When people are kept in abject poverty and illiteracy while others grow rich and "develop their personalities" at the former's expense we speak of oppression; when structures and persons that perpetuate powerlessness are replaced by structures that allow people to stand on their own feet and have their own voice, we speak of liberation.2 Both #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#53. Muslims and Christians can work together to depose dictators and assert the power of the people. We've seen it happen on the Tahrir Square in Cairo during the 2011 revolution in Egypt, with devout Muslims and Coptic Christians protesting side by side. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#54. In good relationships, we are happy to grow as the other person becomes part of us and who we are. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#55. Christianity and Islam are today the most numerous and fastest growing religions globally. Together they encompass more than half of humanity. Consequence: both are here to stay. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#56. The central question was how to remember rightly. And given my Christian sensibilities, my question from the start was, How should I remember abuse as a person committed to loving the wrongdoer and overcoming evil with good? #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#57. The principle cannot be denied: the fiercer the struggle against the injustice you suffer, the blinder you will be to the injustice you inflict. We tend to translate the presumed wrongness of our enemies into an unfaltering conviction of our own rightness. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#58. Impartiality of the state toward all religions. The only adequate option open to Muslims and Christians as citizens of the same state is to advocate the impartiality of the state toward all religions; no religion is preferred by the state, and all religions are impartially supported. This allows Christians and Muslims to be faithful to two fundamental impulses of monotheism simultaneously - to (1) honor the conviction that God is the God of all people and (2) obey God's command to act justly and practice neighborly love toward all people. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#59. Prejudice is a form of untruthfulness, and untruthfulness is an insidious form of injustice. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#60. Rules help govern and steer a relationship along, so they're good things. But they become bad things when they become the narrow gate though which the relationship must always pass. When this happens, the rules become the basis for the relationship and, in a sense, become a substitute for the relationship. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#61. I do believe that Muslims and Christians and Jews pray to the same God. And yet they understand who God is in significantly different ways. #Quote by Miroslav Volf

#62. You'll never live to be as old as me,", he said. "Whatever you think of doing, I've already done it. Wherever you think of going, I've already been and returned. And it was nothing special. #Quote by Miroslav Penkov

#63. We know very well what there is under other people's tails, but we cannot live without sniffing. #Quote by Miroslav Krleza

#64. That was really so upsetting when you are trying to pass on some very serious knowledge and be basically, treated worse than a student coming off the street because his father pays the tuition. Come on. Give me a break. This is no school. This is a joke. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#65. There was the best teachers from the Czech Philharmonic, highly dedicated people, some of the best musicians in the world passing on the knowledge about the country, about the principles, and about the music. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#66. Miroslav Holub seems to expect his readers to act like scientists, who are curious in every direction, take nothing for granted, and are willing to accept any truth, however unexpected. #Quote by Matthew Zapruder

#67. Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye. #Quote by Miroslav Penkov

#68. I did extensive, extensive recordings and made a classical CD-ROM set, which is still on the market. For ten years, it was by itself as the cream of the crop of samples. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#69. So our ears got used to listening to jazz in the place that it was that the bass player could not play. No one really realized it and really addressed it until the bass players who could play their instrument came along and started doing something with it. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#70. The money in the schools overpowers the principles of the purpose. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#71. Revealing her secret to her friends had lightened her burden. She found herself better able to focus, and her mind became a dry sponge soaking up knowledge. Lieutenant Volf may have been a brittle #Quote by M.A. Larson

#72. Tanya, I can not tell you how Leningrad looks today. I used to say that Paris is the most beautiful in the world, and now I am ashamed. every time I come to Russia I'll bring you flowers. And as is our only tryst lost, wasted, gone, I give you my word that I will teach my children to hate war and to be good people. Secondly, apart from vodka, except the tears, I do not know how. #Quote by Miroslav Antic

#73. I had a vision how it should sound and I put all my knowledge into this product and it is a fantastic product. People still tell me that I have the best musical thing there. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#74. (I was) slightly suspicious of these babbling children of intellectuals who were themselves babblers, my schoolmates who had already produced the next senile generation . . . I had noticed that behind their masks people were actually unhelpful, cold, brutally indifferent toward everything that at the moment did not fall within the sphere of their immediate interest. #Quote by Miroslav Krleza

#75. I think that the habit of gloomy poetry is very funny. It's like a special competition in losing. #Quote by Miroslav Holub

#76. I basically started playing violin at the age of six. That lasted about three years because my previous teacher died and the second teacher didn't really know how to successfully get me going. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#77. I am touring in Europe. I am putting together a trio and a quartet. I am playing solo concerts with my symphonic sounds. I am very much engaged back to playing and recording and everything. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#78. Veil, you see, if I vas to say something portentous like "zer dark eyes of zer mind" back home in Uberwald, zer would be a sudden crash of thunder,' said Otto. 'And if I vas to point at a castle on a towering crag and say "Yonder is ... zer castle" a volf would be bound to howl mournfully.' He sighed. 'In zer old country, zer scenery is psychotropic and knows vot is expected of it. Here, alas, people just look at you in a funny vay. #Quote by Terry Pratchett

#79. There is no roles. No one is keeping any roles. The drummer is also answering everybody and everything. So it is a constant conversation and communication between musicians on an extremely high level with extremely valuable material, motifs, and melodies. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#80. I was very much fascinated with the technology we had that we could edit in the computer our compositions, but all the sounds that were available on the market were crap. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#81. I continued studying by myself in the field of jazz with my own technique of improvisation, walking bass lines, rhythms, all kinds of stuff, which I created for myself. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#82. Those who observe suffering are tempted to reject God; those who experience it often cannot give up on God, their solace and their agony." The presence of so many in church on a wintry night proved his point. "You can protest against the evil in the world only if you believe in a good God," Volf also said. "Otherwise the protest doesn't make sense. #Quote by Philip Yancey

#83. I was pretty much prepared because I was already playing in extremely good ways when I arrived from Europe because I played jazz four or five years before I arrived here. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#84. It's no shame to fall down, but it is a shame to just stay down. #Quote by Miroslav Klose

#85. Mental life consists, according to the textbooks, of thought and feeling, according to the poets, of addressing an inner voice (or voices), and according to the dramatists, of internal monologues. In my experience however it consists mainly of intermittent silences, and humming. Humming accompanies habitual and semi-automatic activities, as well as stoppages. Humming accompanies a sort of incomplete concentration on oneself. Humming is characteristic of psychological states in which we are not exactly miserable, and states in which we are not exactly ecstatic. Which amounts I think to more or less always. #Quote by Miroslav Holub

#86. Just put on the lens and go. #Quote by Miroslav Tichy

#87. I am more of a solo bass player and he needed somebody who would keep the role. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#88. If you want to be famous, you must do something more badly than anybody in the entire world. #Quote by Miroslav Tichy

#89. I took it very seriously and got very far with it. I was pretty much on a high level when I arrived. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#90. So I am one of those bass players who can do something and musically, it was back then and now it is even more, if you noticed on the new album, I am not playing all the time anymore. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#91. So the whole basis for jazz music is based on the fact that the bass player could not play his instrument. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#92. I am a Slavic musician and it is deeply inside of me. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#93. Of course she loved the komita more -- he must have been her sweetheart, her first big love. Most likely, they made plans together, imagined a little house, a pair of children. She wouldn't keep his diary for so many years otherwise. And then, with their love peaking, he was killed. I know that much without yet having read the end. At first she felt betrayed. He'd put some strange ideals, brotherhood and freedom, before his love for her. She hated him for that. But then one morning, almost a year after his death, the postman brought a package with foreign stamps. She read the diary, still hating him. She read it every day. She learned each letter by heart, and with the months her hatred thinned, and in the end his death turned their love ideal, doomed not to die. Yes, that's what I've come to think now. Their love was foolish, childish, sugar-sweet, the kind of love that, if you are lucky to lose it, flares up like a thatched roof but burns as long as you live. While our love...I am her husband, she is my wife. #Quote by Miroslav Penkov

#94. Whatever the answer, one senses one thing clearly: the man from whose mind this chaotic vision emanated did not purchase his "outlook on life" in a dime store, but came into this chapel like a meteor and left behind him the smell of cosmic sulphur...And century after century men come here bleating like goats, staring wide eyed at these testimonies of human passion and intelligence... #Quote by Miroslav Krleza

#95. I actually met Chick Corea in New York, where I was staying with a bass player friend. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#96. The main thing that those two albums have in common aside from my music, which of course, a sense of it, you can recognize, it is that the bass on Infinite Search was playing much, much less like a bass. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#97. But I have returned to one hundred percent playing this year. I am fully back to playing full time. #Quote by Miroslav Vitous

#98. Stand still for a while
Our blood entered this soil
But we straightened up again #Quote by Miroslav Florian

#99. I like Joe Sakic. Coming out of Buffalo, I obviously like Alexander Mogliny, Pat LaFontaine. Hasek is up there. Miroslav Satan. Whoever seemed to be a good player at the time I'd watch. Jagr too. I tried to learn a lot from those guys. #Quote by Patrick Kane