Poetic Guidance

Chance & Opportunity

When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.
- Alexander Graham Bell

If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
- Milton Berle


You will never "find" time for anything. If you want time, you must make it.
- Charles Buxton


Opportunities do not come with their values stamped upon them. Everyone must be challenged. A day dawns, quite like other days; in it a single hour comes, quite like other hours; but in that day and in that hour the chance of a lifetime faces us. To face every opportunity of life thoughtfully and ask its meaning bravely and earnestly, is the only way to meet the supreme opportunities when they come, whether open-faced or disguised.
- Maltbie Davenport Babcock

God


Perchance he for whom this bell tolls may be so ill, as that he knows not it tolls for him; and perchance I may think myself so much better than I am, as that they who are about me, and see my state, may have caused it to toll for me, and I know not that. The church is Catholic, universal, so are all her actions; all that she does belongs to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns me; for that child is thereby connected to that body which is my head too, and ingrafted into that body whereof I am a member. And when she buries a man, that action concerns me: all mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.
- Dr. John Donne,
Devotions upon Emergent Occasions
(Meditation XVII)

'Twas much, that man was made like God before,
But, that God should be made like man, much more.
- Dr. John Donne, Holy Sonnets (no. XV)


Go, mark the matchless working of the power
That shuts within the seed the future flower;
Bids these in elegance of form excel.
In color these, and those delight the smell;
Sends nature forth, the daughter of the skies,
To dance on earth, and charm all human eyes.
- William Cowper