worldview and perspective on Signals

During my college years—in my infinite wisdom—it occurred to me that it made no sense to stop at red traffic lights when there was clearly no traffic around. So I began to stop only briefly—just long ...

Emotions make our minds speak to each other. They are the most faithful reproduction of our inner worlds, broadcast externally in the expression of our faces.

You decide to buy a certain kind of car, and suddenly you see it everywhere. A friend recommends an obscure movie to you, and by the end of the week, three more people have mentioned it. You find out ...

"Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, with the possible exception of bad news, which obeys its own special laws."

The most basic way to get someone's attention is this: Break a pattern.

We want big directional signs from God. God just wants us to pay attention.

In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.

Language is not speech, it is a full circle from word to sound to perception to understanding to feeling, to memorizing, to acting and back to the word about the act thus achieved. And before the list...

All words are pegs to hang ideas on.

I began to see a pattern at work in many of us. Our emotions were leading us to thoughts, and those thoughts were dictating our decisions, and our decisions were determining behaviors, and then the be...

Thought is the blossom; language the bud; action the fruit behind it.

In 2002, M. Night Shyamalan released his film Signs , about a widowed former pastor, Graham Hess, who suddenly sees crop circles appear on his farm. At first he thinks they are just the product of mi...

Bit by intelligible bit, a vocation lets us express our healthiest instincts, our noblest desires… In small things and in large, we can attend to the haunting inner summons of our soul.

Locked into captivity by an airplane seat, a kindly disposition of keeping a friend company, or a telephone connection, we become ex officio confessors to those with troubled consciences and traces, o...

Words ought to be a little wild, for they are the assault of thoughts on the unthinking.

All profound things, and emotions of things are preceded and attended by Silence. . . . Silence is the general consecration of the universe.

Speak, Lord, for your servant hears. Grant us ears to hear, Eyes to see, Wills to obey, Hearts to love; Then declare what You will, Reveal what You will, Command what You will, Demand what You will.

If your voice is heard by more people because you've earned some kind of name and fame, your silence on an issue of urgent moral importance is even more of a betrayal. Privilege is obligation.

To frame is to put a language boundary around our experience. It is to name what happens in particular ways, to say how we see the world, and to see the world how we say it is. Framing includes tellin...

Don't believe everything you hear - even in your own mind.

Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.

Thoughts, like fleas, jump from man to man. But they don't bite everybody.

No sign that ever was given To faithful or faithless eyes Showed ever beyond clouds riven So clear a paradise. Earth’s creeds may be seventy times seven And blood have defiled each creed But if such b...

The eyes have one language everywhere.

You can observe a lot by watchin’.

Often, the surest way to convey misinformation is to tell the strict truth.

The sign Jesus promised to the generation that did not understand him was the “sign of Jonas the prophet”—that is, the sign of his own resurrection. The life of every . . . Christian is signed with th...

Bumper stickers—and their counterparts on social media—make Simplicism seem virtuous: “Look at me! I’m a good and brave person for distilling this complex issue down to its essence and righteously tak...

’Tis with our judgments as our watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.

The human mind is like a TV set. When it goes blank, it’s a good idea to turn off the sound.