Sermon quotes on vision
Augustine of Hippo
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering.
Chinese Proverb
If your vision is for a year, plant wheat.
If your vision is for ten years, plant trees.
If your vision is for a lifetime, plant people.
Larry Crabb
A vision we give to others of who and what they could become has power when it echoes what the spirit has already spoken into their souls.
Henry Ford
Vision without execution is just hallucination.
Helen Keller
The most pathetic person in the world is someone who has sight, but has no vision.
Søren Kierkegaard
What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know…The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do…to find the idea for which I can live and die.
Søren Kierkegaard
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.
Henri Nouwen
Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into the places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion, and anguish. Compassion challenges us to cry out with those in misery, to mourn with those who are lonely, to weep with those in tears. Compassion requires us to be weak with the weak, vulnerable with the vulnerable, and powerless with the powerless. Compassion means full immersion in the condition of being human.
The Leadership Challenge
The vision of an organization acts as its magnetic north.
Abraham Lincoln
Some single mind must be master, else there will be no agreement in anything.
Max Lucado
Jesus gives us hope because He keeps us company, has a vision and knows the way we should go.
Meister Eckhart
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.
Sermons of Meister Eckhart
Attributed to Michelangelo
The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.
Marcel Proust
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
Remembrance of Things Past
Theodore Roosevelt
Keep your eyes on the stars, and your feet on the ground.
Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt’s America: Selections from the Writings of the Oyster Bay Naturalist
John Ruskin
Genius is only a superior power of seeing
Arthur Schopenhauer
Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.
Studies in Pessimism: The Essays
Krister Stendahl
Our vision is more obstructed by what we think we know than by our lack of knowledge.
Jonathan Swift
Vision is the art of seeing things invisible.
Iris Murdoch
I can only choose within the world that I can see.
The Sovereignty of Good
Chuck Swindoll
When I think of vision, I have in mind the ability to see above and beyond the majority.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
People only see what they are prepared to see.
Emerson in His Journals, Harvard University Press
Benjamin Zander
Goals can be energizing—when you win. But a vision is more powerful than a goal. A vision is enlivening, it’s spirit-giving, it’s the guiding force behind all great human endeavors. Vision is about shared energy, a sense of awe, a sense of possibility.
Ancient Chinese Proverb
If your vision is for a year, plant wheat.
If your vision is for ten years, plant trees.
If your vision is for a lifetime, plant people.
John Ruskin
The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way. Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.
Peter Drucker
Leadership is lifting a person’s vision to higher sights, raising of a person’s performance to a higher standard, of building a personality beyond its normal limitations.
Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices
Elisabeth Elliot
Our vision is so limited we can hardly imagine a love that does not show itself in protection from suffering. The love of God did not protect His own Son.
Meister Eckhart
The reason we are not able to see God is the faintness of our desire.
Mark Batterson
If you let your circumstances define the way you see God, you are a prisoner of perspective. Or worse, a prisoner of your past mistakes! But if you let God define the way you see your circumstances, you are a prisoner of hope.
Double Blessing: Don’t Settle for Less Than You’re Called to Bless, Multnomah, 2019.
Andy Stanley
A clear vision, along with the courage to follow through, dramatically increases your chances of coming to the end of your life, looking back with a deep abiding satisfaction, and thinking, I did it. I succeeded. I finished well. My life counted.
Visioneering
Max Lucado
Jesus gives us hope because he keeps us company, has a vision, and knows the way we should go.
George Eliot
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded, with, stupidity.
Thomas Merton
Life is this simple. We are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and God is shining through all the time. This is not just a fable or a nice story. It is true. If we abandon ourselves to God and forget ourselves, we see it sometimes, and we see it maybe frequently. God shows himself everywhere, in everything- in people and in things and in nature and in events. It becomes very obvious that God is everywhere and in everything and we cannot be without him. It’s impossible. The only thing is that we don’t see it.
Life And Solitude (tapes)
Jim Collins
Vision isn’t necessary to make money; you can certainly create a profitable business without it. There are plenty of people who have made a lot of money, yet had no compelling vision. But if you want to do more than just make a lot of money—if you want to build an enduring, great company—then you need a vision.
John Lubbock
How little we see! What we do see depends mainly on what we look for.
Vincent van Gogh
You need a certain dose of inspiration, a ray from on high, that is not in ourselves, in order to do beautiful things.
Walter Brueggemann
Questions of implementation are of no consequence until the vision can be imagined. The imagination must come before implementation. Our culture is competent to implement almost anything and to imagine almost nothing.
The Prophetic Imagination, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 40.
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