Eugene H. Peterson Quotes

I try to keep a Sabbath perspective.

He sees no need for setting apart one day in seven as a holy day, since to him all days are God's.

What is worthy or unworthy on the Sabbath day will have to be judged by each of us by trying to be honest with the Lord. On the Sabbath day, we should do what we have to do and what we ought to do in an attitude of worshipfulness and then limit our other activities.

When I had to make a decision whether or not an activity was appropriate for the Sabbath, I simply asked myself, 'What sign do I want to give to God?' That question made my choices about the Sabbath day crystal clear.

I admire those that keep Shabbat every week and do not allow anything to interfere with it. It is such a beautiful way to stay connected to friends and family and force yourself to slow down.

O what a blessing is Sunday, interposed between the waves of worldly business like the divine path of the Israelites through the sea! There is nothing in which I would advise you to be more strictly conscientious than in keeping the Sabbath day holy. I can truly declare that to me the Sabbath has been invaluable.

Are our lives truly filled with the presence of God? How many things take the place of God in my life each day?

To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter into the desert of loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude.

Time does not become sacred to us until we have lived it.

The less the head, the more the wound will heal. No head there is no wound. Live a headless life. Move as a total being, and accept things.

Spirituality doesn’t exist on another level different from ordinary life.

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

Oh, how daily life is.

Anything one does every day is important and imposing and anywhere one lives is interesting and beautiful.

The moment you function in the world without being concerned about what is happening to life around you, you are a Criminal.

Do not shorten the morning by getting up late; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred.

Please live a healthy life - medicine is an imperfect science.

You might get up in the morning and do your devotions and say a few prayers and there you go. You think you've done your connecting for the day. But you don't know how to wait before the Lord and really stop and hear from the Lord or dig deeper and walk throughout the day with the Lord. It's like sending a quick Tweet or checking your Facebook page real quick. "Hey Lord, what's going on?" But you're missing the intimacy of, "Be still and know that I am God."

As you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them --"ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is.

The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.

Only very few people are born with awareness. Those are the people who die in awareness. If the death was conscious, then the birth will be conscious, because the death is the one side and the birth is the other side of the same coin.

It may arrive in the instant when we are doing something mundane, like putting our front-door key in the lock; it may lie hidden in the quiet that follows the lunch hour or in the thousand and one things that all seem the same to us.

One man cannot do right in one department of life whilst he is occupied in doing wrong in any other department. Life is one indivisible whole

Life is better lived than conceptualized. — This writing can be less demanding should I allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I’ve come to understand that life is best to be lived — not to be conceptualized. If you have to think, you still do not understand.