Quaker Quotes to Memorize (with guest editor Max L. Carter)

“And when all my hopes in them, and in all people was gone, so that I had nothing outwardly to help me, nor could tell what to do, Then, O! Then I heard a voice, which said, ‘There is one, even Christ Jesus, that can speak to thy condition’: and when I heard it, my heart did leap for joy.”

“There is that near you which will guide you. O! Hearken unto it, and be sure ye keep to it.”

“Truth for authority, not authority for truth.”

“If one has had the experience of an inward, spiritual transformation, no outward forms are necessary. If one has not, no outward forms will suffice.”

“To sit down in silence could at the least pledge me to nothing; it might open to me (as it did that morning) the very gate of heaven. And, since that day, now more than 17 years ago, Friends’ meetings have indeed been to me the greatest of outward helps to a fuller entrance into the spirit from which they have sprung.”

“I’d rather be jolly St. Francis, singing his canticle to the sun, than a dour, old sober-sides Quaker whose diet would appear to have been spiritual persimmons.”

“In my own life, I was steeped in the religious understanding of my Quaker forebears on both sides of the family, and in a closely-bordered childhood on a dairy farm in an Indiana Quaker community. But it wasn’t until a spiritual epiphany in 1964 that led to my becoming a conscientious objector that I made Quaker spirituality experiential rather than ‘inherited.'”