Quotes Tagged "god"

Everyone claims to be okay with freedom of religion, but the moment you mention God there is a strange tension that fills the air. If there was a 6th sense, that would be it.

At best we are but clay, animated dust; but viewed as sinners, we are monsters indeed. Let it be published in heaven as a miracle that the Lord Jesus should set His heart's love upon people like us.

Stories are masks of God. That's a story, too, of course. I made it up, in collaborations with Joseph Campbell and Scheherazade, Jesus and the Buddha and the Brother's Grimm. Stories show us how to bear the unbearable, approach the unapproachable, conceive the inconceiveable. Stories provide meaning, texture, layers and layers of truth. Stories can also trivialize. Offered indelicately, taken too literally, stories become reductionist tools, rendering things neat and therefore false. Even as we must revere and cherish the masks we variously create, Campbell reminds us, we must not mistake the masks of God for God. So it seemes to me that one of the most vital things we can teach our children is how to be storytellers. How to tell stories that are rigorously, insistently, beautifully true. And how to believe them.

Mystical experiences do not necessarily supply new ideas to the mind, rather, they transform what one believes into what one knows, converting abstract concepts, such as divine love, into vivid, personal, realities.

In recent times, more and more human thinking has come to assume that the idea of a universal natural law and the idea of 'God' are pointing to one and the same reality.

The real crisis of worship today is not that the preaching is paltry or that it’s too drafty in church. It is that people have no sense of the presence of God, and if they have no sense of His presence, how can they be moved to express the deepest feelings of their souls to honor, revere, worship, and glorify God?

The glory of God is as destructive of evil as it is creative of good.

Why did I, like thousands of others, have to carry a cross I hadn't chosen, a cross which was not made for my shoulders and which didn't concern me? Who decided to come rummaging around in my obscure existence, invade my gray anonymity, my meager tranquility, and bowl me like a little ball in a great game of skittles? God? Well, in that case, if He exists, if He really exists, let Him hide His face. Let Him put His two hands on His head, and let Him bow down. It may be, as Peiper used to teach us, that many men are unworthy of Him, but now I know that He, too, is unworthy of most of us, and that if the creature is capable of producing horror, it's solely because his Creator has slipped him the recipe for it.

Man was designed in a way in which he must eat in order to give him a solid reason to go to work everyday. This helps to keep him out of trouble. God is wise.

God's holiness is not an unloving holiness, and God's love is not an unholy love. It is only by keeping these two primary moral qualities of the divine being closely related that we may rightly behold the character of God. (p. 98)

If you can't illustrate 'it', 'it' doens't belong in Physics as a noun! You can't put an article in front. You can't put a verb after!

لم يكن الرب أكثر ما أخافني لكن اولئك الذين غالوا في الإيمان به. وكان الشيء الثاني الذي يرعبني غباء الورعين، الذي لا يمكن أبداً مقارنة حكمهم بحكم الرب - حاشا للرب- الذي يعبدونه من كل قلوبهم

A mathematician is an individual who believes that prophesying that his dog will die if he deprives it of food constitutes a prediction.

This universe is shot through with mystery. The very fact of its being, and of our own, is a mystery absolute, and the only miracle worthy of the name. The consciousness that animates us is itself central to this mystery and the ground for any experience we might wish to call 'spiritual.' No myths need be embraced for us to commune with the profundity of our circumstance. No personal God need be worshiped for us to live in awe at the beauty and immensity of creation. No tribal fictions need be rehearsed for us to realize, one fine day, that we do, in fact, love our neighbors, that our happiness is inextricable from their own, and that our interdependence demands that people everywhere be given the opportunity to flourish.

It is ignorance or at least lack of consideration of heavenly things that make the temporal things of this world, whether good or evil, greater than they really are.

God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages. And we are enabled to apprehend at all what is sublime and noble only by the perpetual instilling and drenching of the reality which surrounds us. The universe constantly and obediently answers to our conceptions; whether we travel fast or slow, the track is laid for us.

Mr. Frimpong is the oldest person from church. That's when I knew why he sings louder than anybody else: it's because he's been waiting the longest for God to answer. He thinks God has forgotten him. I only knew it then. Then I loved him but it was too late to go back.

ولو ظل الإنسان ينكر كل ما لا يحسه لما خسر بذلك الأديان وحدها، بل خسر معها العلوم والمعارف وقيم الآداب والأخلاق.

Fear only one person that is God, listen to only one voice that is your conscience”.

Justin Martyr explained the distinction and the sameness of the Father and the Son with the analogy of a candle. The flame can pass from one candle to another without changing in quality or diminishing the first.