Parables, yes. We here are to lead life with woe. Tasting bitter.the Tai Chi instructor

Jesus taught in parables for a reason.

By telling stories, Jesus isn’t somehow putting sugar in a spoon to make the medicine go down a bit easier. These stories are the medicine. These stories are an extension and explanation of Jesus’ revolutionary...

The vibrations he felt in his sleep had nothing to do with his soul easing out of his body as he dreamily thought; they came solely from the weight and motion of the freight train...

judgment, as it is portrayed in the parables of Jesus (not to mention the rest of the New Testament) never comes until after acceptance: grace remains forever the sovereign consideration. The difference between the blessed...

Throughout the parables the paradoxical teachings continue: Give to receive. Die to live. Lose to win.

With Jesus, however, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.

Artists use lies to tell the truth. Yes, I created a lie. But because you believed it, you found something true about yourself.

If the story-tellers could ha’ got decency and good morals from true stories, who’d have troubled to invent parables?

Silk is a fine, delicate, soft, illuminating, beautiful substance. But you can never rip it! If a man takes this tender silk and attempts to tear it, and cannot tear it, is he in his...

I have found so many angels trapped inside undisputed jargon that I find myself digging at the words, in order to release them, from the books that unfairly captured their soul.

Maybe that’s why Jesus was so fond of parables: Nothing describes the indescribable like a good yarn.

Being popular doesn’t always win spiritual change. Christ didn’t pour out the coins of the moneychangers and overturn their tables with any degree of manners when he cleansed the temple. His harshness drew a point—to...

[On famous Nobel Laureate Niels Bohr][Niels] Bohr’s sort of humor, use of parables and stories, tolerance, dependence on family, feelings of indebtedness, obligation, and guilt, and his sense of responsibility for science, community, and, ultimately,...

You can find anyone that will tell you what you want to hear, but the only one worth valuing is the one that tells you what you need to learn.

The way some people read the parables reminds me of Aesop’s Fables. And the way others read them reminds me of the way some discern clue after perplexing clue in their Beatle albums as evidence...

To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.