Melody Beattie Quotes

“Gratitude isn't a tool to manipulate the universe or God. It's a way to acknowledge our faith that everything happens for a reason even if we don't know what that reason is. ~Melody Beattie, 52 Weeks of Conscious Contact, pg. 34.”

“Our character isn’t defined by the battles we win or lose, but by the battles we dare to fight.”

“During the Reformation and the Enlightenment, nature came to be understood in a mechanistic sense as bereft of any capacity for divine grace or revelation. We’ll explore this suggestion further in the next chapter. In order to appreciate the significance of this, we have to recognize that nature is a cultural construct. When we speak of nature, we are using language to describe the world around us with all its species, life-forms and landscapes. But nature is a concept whose meaning changes with different perceptions and ways of looking at the world. This means that supernatural is also a concept which has different meanings, for it refers to phenomena or experiences which do not seem to fit within our particular expectations of what nature is or should be. The term supernatural therefore depends on a certain concept of what natural is. For many people who are less determinately materialist than Dawkins, there may be an indeterminate region which is neither strictly natural nor strictly supernatural. A red rose may be natural, but when I am given one by the person I love, I experience a range of emotions, memories and associations which endow that rose with symbolic significance and make it, in some sense, supernatural. It transcends its natural biological functions to communicate something in the realms of beauty, hope and love.”

“You've achieved success in your field when you don't know whether what you're doing is work or play.”

“And beauty immortal awakes from the tomb.”

“No jealousy their dawn of love overcast, nor blasted were their wedded days with strife; each season looked delightful as it past, to the fond husband and the faithful wife.”

“We can trust ourselves to know when our boundaries are being violated.”

“How sweet the words of Truth, breathed from the lips of Love.”

“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

“Make New Year's goals. Dig within, and discover what you would like to have happen in your life this year. This helps you do your part. It is an affirmation that you're interested in fully living life in the year to come.”