John Powell Quotations

You can't reinvent yourself for every movie.

I wanted to play music from the age of seven. I suddenly fell in love with it and that's what I was going to do, or to be involved with music. It was just speaking to me at a level that as a seven year old I suddenly realized the world was capable of supporting in my head a lot more than what I was understanding verbally and visually.

You just don't make decisions about what you're going to be like when you are old. I know that I am making that decision right now. Every time we perceive ourselves, others, life, the world and God in a certain way, we are deepening the habits that will take over in old age. Every time I act on the insights that I am getting now I am deciding my future and choosing to be a kindly or cynical old man. Our yesterdays lie heavily upon our todays and our todays will lie heavily upon our tomorrows.

There is no such thing as a peace of soul approach to religion. It makes of God a gigantic Bayer Aspirin; take God three times a day and you won't feel any pain.

God alone can make a man a believer. Our part is to accept or reject his initiative.

There's the whole myth about rocket science. It's really not that hard. It's not brain surgery.

I have to be honest in asking myself: Do I really want to know and do God's will? Or is it rather that I want God to do my will? Do I go to God with the assurance that I want only to know and do his will? Or do I rather first make my own plans and then insist that God make my dreams come true?

By afflictions God is spoiling us of what otherwise might have spoiled us. When he makes the world too hot for us to hold, we let it go.

Old cranks have practiced all their lives, just as old saints have likewise practiced all their lives. They just practiced different life principles.

Attitudes are capable of making the same experience either pleasant or painful.