Godly Quotes (page 174)
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The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak...
Annie Dillard
Father, I do acknowledge and confess
That I this honor, I this pomp have brought
To Dagon, and advanc’d his praises high
among the Heathen round; to God have brought
Dishonor, obloquy, and op’d the mouths
Of Idolists, and Atheists
[…]The anguish of my Soul, that suffers not
Mine eye to harbor sleep, or thoughts to rest.
This only hope relieves me, that the strife
With mee hath end.
John Milton
It is God's earth out of which man is taken. From it he has his body. His body belongs to his essential being. Man's body is not his prison, his shell his exterior, but man himself. Man does not "have" a body; he does not "have" a soul; rather he "is" body and soul. Man in the beginning is really his body. He is one. He is his body, as Christ is completely his body, as the Church is the body of Christ
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Christians . . . ought not to be threatened by fantasy and imagination. Great painting is not "photographic": think of the Old Testament art commanded by God. There were blue pomegranates on the robes of the priest who went into the Holy of Holies. In nature there are no blue pomegranates. Christian artists do not need to be threatened by fantasy and imagination, for they have a basis for knowing the difference between them and the real world "out there." The Christian is the really free...
Francis Schaeffer
If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries These, in the day when heaven was falling, The hour when earth's foundations fled, Followed their mercenary calling. And took their wages and are dead. Their shoulders held the sky suspended; They stood, and earth's foundations stay; What God abandoned, these defended, And saved the sum of things for pay.
A. E. Housman
The world of things entered your infant mind. To populate that crystal cabinet. Within its walls the strangest partners met, And things turned thoughts did propagate their kind. For, once within, corporeal fact could find. A spirit. Fact and you in mutual debt. Built there your little microcosm - which yet. Had hugest tasks to its small self assigned. Dead men can live there, and converse with stars: Equator speaks with pole, and night with day; Spirit dissolves the world's material bars -A...
Julian Huxley
I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So it can make us happy? Good God, we’d be just as happy if we had no books at all… A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
Franz Kafka