Quotes about Risk

Always living in the safe zone of life and never taking chances actually makes one a thief and a robber.

God doesn't want us to be gamblers. He wants us to be investors.

If we are not willing to risk what we have now, we will never find out what we could have.

Our lives improve only when we take chances -- and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.

The crowd, in its uncritical political engagement, is not always discerning about new possibility that comes with risk and often votes in fear for the status quo.

It is the work of the poet to imagine YHWH out beyond old stereotypes and to show us that the God of Israel, at the very moment of risk, is a God of healing, transformative, covenantal fidelity.

The shock of such a partner destabilizes us too much. The risk too great, the discomfort so demanding. We much prefer to settle for a less demanding, less overwhelming meeting. Yet we are haunted by the awareness that only this overwhelming meeting gives life.

Second, the elders of the city (Bethlehem) are trembling. They want to know why he comes. They do not even know yet whose side he is on. They presume he is still an agent of Saul. If so, the Judeans tremble because Saul is no friend of southerners. Or if he is not an agent of Saul, it is even more dangerous, because then he may come to include them in an act of betrayal, which is more risk than they want.

If one is linked to a flat, one-dimensional faith, then this verse is a bitter loss of faith . But if we think in terms of obedience on its way to risky imagination, then this verse is an opening for new faith beyond the conventions and routines that secure but do not reckon with God's awefulness .

Hope, on one hand, is an absurdity too embarrassing to speak about, for it flies in the face of all those claims we have been told are facts. Hope is the refusal to accept the reading of reality which is the majority opinion; and one does that only at great political and existential risk. On the other hand, hope is subversive, for it limits the grandiose pretension of the present, daring to announce that the present to which we have all made commitments is now called into question.

You will never get what you don't ask for. You can't find what you aren't looking for. "You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

It is with this thought that many believers would call up Kierkegaard's famous phrase, the 'leap of faith,' pictured perhaps as a leap from here to there, leaving out the in-between... What is usually overlooked, however, is that Kierkegaard said nothing about a safe landing; there was only the leap, and no guarantee of solid ground beyond it.