Rowan Williams Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

A healthy human environment is one in which we try to make sense of our limits, of the accidents that can always befall us and the passage of time which inexorably changes us.

Rowan Williams
What can we say about a marketing culture that so openly feeds and colludes with obsession? The Disney empire has developed this to an unprecedented degree of professionalism.

Rowan Williams
Quite a lot of our contemporary culture is actually shot through with a resentment of limits and the passage of time, anger at what we can't do, fear or even disgust at growing old.

Rowan Williams
In a spiritually sensitive culture, then, it might well be that age is something to be admired or envied.

Rowan Williams
We have only one global hegemonic power. It is not accumulating territory: it is trying to accumulate influence and control.

Rowan Williams
We have to learn to be human alongside all sorts of others, the ones whose company we don't greatly like.

Rowan Williams
We shall not find life by refusing to let go of our precious, protected selves.

Rowan Williams
Our present ecological crisis, the biggest single practical threat to our human existence in the middle to long term, has, religious people would say, a great deal to do with our failure to think of the world as existing in relation to the mystery of God, not just as a huge warehouse of stuff to be used for our convenience.

Rowan Williams
Silence is letting what there is be what it is. In that sense it has to do profoundly with God: the silence of simply being. We experience that at times when there is nothing we can say or do that would not intrude on the integrity and the beauty of that being.

Rowan Williams
I can only ask your prayers as, like Augustine shivering in his shoes on the French coast at the prospect of dealing with the savage English, I stand on the shore wondering what lies ahead.

Rowan Williams
In sharp contrast to the idea that this stage of life is enviable, we hear high levels of anxiety about getting old, anxieties about health, mobility, access to facilities, simple routine care and attention.

Rowan Williams
We can at least see that the question is asked, and asked on the basis of a clear recognition that there is no way of manipulating our environment that is without cost or consequence - and thus also of a recognition that we are inextricably bound up with the destiny of our world. There is no guarantee that the world we live in will 'tolerate' us indefinitely if we prove ourselves unable to live within its constraints.

Rowan Williams
How do we live in a way that shows an understanding that we genuinely live in a shared world, not one that simply belongs to us?

Rowan Williams