Who God Is Quotes (page 10)
That having sex with someone you do not care for feels lonelier than not having sex in the first place, afterward. That it is permissible to want. That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else. That this isn't necessarily perverse. That there might not be angels, but there are people who might as well be angels. That God? unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both? speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of...
David Foster Wallace
When I consider how my light is spent. Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, And that one talent which is death to hide. Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent. To serve therewith my Maker, and present. My true account, lest he returning chide,"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent. That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need. Either man's work or his own gifts: who best. Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state. Is...
John Milton
Here in St. Cloud’s,” Dr. Larch wrote, “ I have been given the choice of playing God or leaving practically everything up to chance. It is my experience that practically everything is left up to chance much of the time; men who believe in good and evil, and who believe that good should win, should watch for those moments when it is possible to play God – we should seize those moments. There won’t be may
John Irving
I am a man, and men are animals who tell stories. This is a gift from God, who spoke our species into being, but left the end of our story untold. That mystery is troubling to us. How could it be otherwise? Without the final part, we think, how are we to make sense of all that went before: which is to say, our lives?
So we make stories of our own, in fevered and envious imitation of our Maker, hoping that we'll tell, by chance, what God left untold. And finishing our tale, come to understand...
Clive Barker
Without you, without your onslaughts, without your uprootings of us, we should remain all our lives inert, stagnant, puerile, ignorant both of ourselves and of God. You who batter us and then dress our wounds, you who resist us and yield to us, you who wreck and build, you who shackle and liberate, the sap of our souls, the hand of God, the flesh of Christ: it is you, matter, that I bless.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
A man who struggles long to pray and study Torah will be able to discover the sparks of divine light in all of creation, in each solitary bush and grain and woman and man. And when he cleaves strenuously to God for many years, he will be able to release the sparks to unwrap and lift these particular shreds of holiness, and return them to God. This is the human task: to direct and channel the spark's return. This task is tikkun, restoration. Yours is a holy work on earth right now, they...
Annie Dillard
In these words the Apostle sets forth a most apt antithesis: first, he who is justified by faith has peace with God, but tribulation with the world, because his life is spiritual. Secondly, the unrighteous have peace with the world, but anguish and tribulation with God, because their life is carnal. Thirdly, as God the Holy Spirit is eternal, so also the peace of the righteous and the tribulation of the unrighteous will be everlasting. Lastly, as the flesh is temporal, so also the tribulation...
Martin Luther
Of all the creations of the Almighty, there is none more beautiful, none more inspiring than a lovely daughter of God who walks in virtue with an understanding of why she should do so, who honors and respects her body as a thing sacred and divine, who cultivates her mind and constantly enlarges the horizon of her understanding, who nurtures her spirit with everlasting truth. God will hold us accountable if we neglect His daughters. He has given us a great and compelling trust. May we be...
Gordon B. Hinckley
Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.
Jeanette Winterson
There is no error more common than that of thinking that those who are the causes or occasions of great tragedies share in the feelings suitable to the tragic mood: no error more fatal than expecting it of them. The martyr in his 'shirt of flame' may be looking on the face of God, but to him who is piling the faggots or loosening the logs for the blast the whole scene is no more than the slaying of an ox is to the butcher, or the felling of a tree to the charcoal burner in the forest, or the...
Oscar Wilde
If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
Isaac Asimov
Believers obey Christ as the one whom our obedience is accepted by God. Believers know all their duties are weak, imperfect, and unable to abide in God's presence. Therefore they look to Christ as the one who bears the iniquity of their holy things, who adds incense to their prayers, gathers out all the weeds from their duties and makes them acceptable to God.
John Owen
I perceived or thought of the Light of God and in it suspended one small mote (or millions of motes to only one of which was my small mind directed), glittering white because of the individual ray from the Light which both held and lit it... And the ray was the Guardian Angel of the mote: not a thing interposed between God and the creature, but God's very attention itself, personalized... This is a finite parallel to the Infinite. As the love of the Father and Son (who are infinite and...
J. R. R. Tolkien