Quotes by Authors - Page 4958

Do I have YOUR permission to be a Supernatural God? If I want to open heaven, and in a moment in time, touch the heart of a daughter and supernaturally break all the darkness, shame, and torment in her life, MAY I DO THAT?
Jim Anderson
The mind is constituted to accept the god of the more powerful. If you have to choose between the god of the slave owner and the god of the enslaved, naturally you will choose the former . . .
Barry Unsworth
But somehow, standing in the clear night air, under a sky that glowed like a shower of sparks, none of that stuff mattered. It slipped off me. It was like shedding your clothes before you step in the shower. I felt I was down to essentials again. In fact I felt very close to God at that moment. I guess if you're ever going to feel close to God it'll be while you're looking at the heavens.
John Marsden
I suppose therefore God is the connoisseur of filthied hearts and souls, and can see the old, the first pattern in them, and cherish them for that.
Sebastian Barry
Christ.No, not Christ. These leavings were made in propitiation of a much older God than the Christian one. People have called Him different things at different times, but Rachel’s sister gave Him a perfectly good name, I think: Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, God of dead things left in the ground, God of rotting flowers in drainage ditches, God of the Mystery.
Stephen King
As we wait and pray, God weaves his story and creates a wonder. Instead of drifting between comedy (denial) and tragedy (reality), we have a relationship with the living God, who is intimately involved with the details of our worlds. We are learning to watch for the story to unfold, to wait for the wonder.
Paul E. Miller
But he looks no more than thirty. He's very handsome-- so much you will admit; nor will you deny that he is very wealthy and very powerful; the greatest nobleman in Brittany. He will make me a great lady.''God made you that, Aline.
Rafael Sabatini
as the needs of all living things must, we have proved that it is a very safe thing to trust in the Lord our God.
Amy Carmichael
Our obedience is God's pleasure when it proves that God is our treasure. This is good news, because it means very simply that the command to obey is the command to be happy in God. The commandments of God are only as hard to obey as the promises of God are hard to believe. The Word of God is only as hard to obey as the beauty of God is hard to cherish.
John Piper
When confronted with suffering that won't go away or with even a minor problem, we instinctively focus on what is missing,...not on the Master's hand. Often when you think everything has gone wrong, it's just that you're in the middle of a story. If you watch the stories God is weaving in your life, you... will begin to see the patterns. You'll become a poet, sensitive to your Father's voice.
Paul E. Miller
Providence is wiser than you, and you may be confident it has suited all things better to your eternal good than you could do had you been left to your own option.
John Flavel
Prayer is asking God to incarnate, to get dirty in your life. Yes, the eternal God scrubs floors. For sure we know he washes feet. So take Jesus at his word. Ask him. Tell him what you want. Get dirty. Write out your prayer requests; don't mindlessly drift through life on the American narcotic of busyness. If you try to seize the day, the day will eventually break you. Seize the corner of his garment and don't let go until he blesses you. He will reshape the day.
Paul E. Miller
Do I believe in God? Sure. So I believe the Bible is the arbiter of theological knowledge? There it gets a little hazy.
Don Hoesel
Slowly, God is opening my eyes to needs all around me. In Scripture, God revisits this issue of caring for the poor- an echo that repeats itself from Genesis to Revelation. The Bible acknowledges that the poor will always be part of society, but God takes on their cause. The Mosaic law of the Old Testament is filled with regulations to prevent and eliminate poverty. The poor were given the right to glean- to take produce from the unharvested edges of the fields, a portion of the tithes, and a daily wage. The law prevented permanent slavery by releasing Jewish bondsmen and women on the sabbatical and Jubilee year and forbade charging interest on loans. In one of his most tender acts, God made sure that the poor- the aliens, widows, and orphans- were all invited to the feasts.
Margaret Feinberg
God is always working in every detail of our lives to help us turn our heart toward him. The life we've always wanted is found in Jesus.
Gary Heim and Lisa Heim
Was I sorry that I chose to come by hand cart? No. Neither then nor any minute of my life since. The price we paid to become acquainted with God was a privilege to pay and I am thankful that I was privileged to come in the Martin Hand Cart Company.
Francis Webster
If there was a God he reasoned it would have the same relation to us as we have to blades of grass. Do we make them grow? Yes in the sense that we water the lawn. Do we care for them and worry over them? Again as a lawn but not as individual blades. We don't give them names. We just want them to look nice and green. A God who created the earth would want it to look nice an blue from space. He would sit back after a long day of creating things and think to himself now that's what a planet should look like.
Tom Lichtenberg
(God) being the old man invented in order to, and with whom to, hold long conversations.
Milan Kundera
Earthly contemplation means to the Christian, we have said, this above all: that behind all that we directly encounter the Face of the incarnate Logos becomes visible... Contemplation does not ignore the "historical Gethsemane," does not ignore the mystery of evil, guilt and its bloody atonement. The happiness of contemplation is a true happiness, indeed the supreme happiness; but it is founded upon sorrow.
Josef Pieper
But somehow, once you start playing behind the steering wheel of God, you realize just how powerful it is to be the imagination driving the natural world (64).
Kola Boof
The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I've ever met.""You've met God?""Certainly. I telephone Him every night.
Haruki Murakami
I have yet to hear God's audible voice, although I have often felt led by God in more subtle ways.
Tony Dungy
To their simple, degenerate minds there was only one thing to do when faced by a God more powerful than their own: Convert.Brandon Sanderson(Elantris)
Brandon Sanderson
It doesn’t cause me to doubt God’s existence, but it does force me to admit there’s a lot about God I don’t understand.
Carolyn Custis James
In relationship to God one can not involve himself to a certain degree. God is precisely the contradiction to all that is 'to a certain degree'.
Søren Kierkegaard
We are here to witness. There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. Until Larry teaches his stone to talk, until God changes his mind, or until the pagan gods slip back to their hilltop groves, all we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it.
Annie Dillard
On a high mountain I stood, And cried the name of Ali, Lion of God.O Ali, Lion of God, King of Men, Bring joy to our sorrowful hearts.
Khaled Hosseini
Unfortunates, who ought to begin with God, do not have any hope in him till they have exhausted all other means of deliverance.
Alexandre Dumas
I take leave to contradict those who say that salvation is an evolution! All that ever can be evolved out of the sinful heart of man is sin-and nothing else! Salvation is the free gift of God, by Jesus Christ, and the work of it is supernatural. It is done by the Lord Himself, and He has power to do it, however weak, no, however dead in sin, the sinner may be!
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David's thoughts kept heaven-road. "I am still with Thee." God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory?... A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.
Dallas Willard
What have we been doing all these centuries but trying to call God back to the mountain, or, failing that, raise a peep out of anything that isn't us? What is the difference between a cathedral and a physics lab? Are not they both saying: Hello? We spy on whales and on interstellar radio objects; we starve ourselves and pray till we're blue.
Annie Dillard
At the end of time when God judges us humans, I just hope He remembers to judge Himself as well.
Indra Sinha
Is it a time for you, you I say, to dwell in your roofed-in houses?' (Haggai 1:4). The reply might have been that it was unreasonable to expect anyone to live in a roofless house, but the question made its point. What worth did they set on their God, when they left His Temple in ruins?
Joyce G. Baldwin
God, nevertheless, required a little help from men, and what he mostly got was hindrance.
Ellis Peters
Self distrust is good, but only if it leads to trust in God. Otherwise it ends as spiritual paralysis, inability and unwillingness to undertake any course of action.
Alan Cole
An entire nation shook under the power of one man’s [MLK’s] dream! Now if one dream can do that for our nation, imagine what a dream can do for the Church.
Wayne Cordeiro
Next to us is not the workman whom we have hired, with whom we love so well to talk, but the workman whose work we are.
Henry David Thoreau
We are not to be occupied with our feelings or symptoms,or our faith or lack of faith,but only with what God has said
Gordon Lindsay
GOD. Sometimes I think there might be a god out there, and that every once in a while he tunes in to see what we're up to, and have a good laugh at how we like to dress him up in various costume. Robes, thorny crowns, yarmulkes and curls, saris and butt-hugging yoga pants. Male, female, a genderless reincarnation factory; a Mother Earth or a withholding Father Christmas. I would think it would amuse the hell out of him. That we're all idolaters, worshiping figments of our own creation who bear no resemblance to him.Maybe he's sitting in some alternate dimension somewhere, saying, 'Shit, I didn't even create the world! I was just cooking my dinner, not paying attention to the heat, and suddenly here was this big band and a few hours later, a bunch of dinosaurs...
Suzanne Morrison
Contemplative prayer is natural, unprogrammed; it is perpetual openness to God, so that in the openness his concerns can flow in and out of our minds as he wills.
Ray Simpson
Boy you really missed the boat. I’ll make it simple, so’s even fuckin you can understand. Papa God growed us up till we could wear long pants; then he licensed his name to dollar bills, left some car keys on the table, and got the fuck outta town”. Water rushes to his eye-holes. “Don’t be lookin up at no sky for help. Look down here, at us twisted dreamers”. He takes hold of my shoulders, spins me around, and punches me towards the mirror on the wall. “You’re the God. Take responsibility. Exercise your power
D.B.C. Pierre
Now there are some, and I don't just mean Communists like you, but thinking men of all political parties, who think that not many of these gods actually exist. Some believe that none of them exist. There's just us and an ocean of darkness around us. I'm no philosopher or poet, how would I know the truth? It's true that all these gods seem to do awfully little work - much like our politicians - and yet keep winning reelection to their golden thrones in heaven, year after year. That's not to say I don't respect them, Mr. Premier! Don't you ever let that blasphemous idea into your yellow skull. My country is the kind where it pays to play it both ways: the Indian entrepreneur has to be straight and crooked, mocking and believing, sly and sincere, at the same time.
Aravind Adiga
Love is love. It is God-given, and a sacrament. It is not for any man to judge.
Kathleen McGowan
There is something deep within us that sobs at endings. Why, God, does everything have to end? Why does all nature grow old? Why do spring and summer have to go?
Joe L. Wheeler
There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. . . . The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed.
Richard Dawkins
You twitch as the darkness moves in and out of you. It crawls up your spine and nestles in your brain like an evil thought from out of nowhere, burying itself in your psyche like a starving leech looking for a vein.
Stephen Biro
The most destructive thing we can possibly do in life is to make another person doubt his worth and identity as a child of God. The very most productive thing we can do is to help ourselves and others realize that as children of God, our worth is infinite.
Toni Sorenson
Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game 'or else people won't take it seriously'. Apparently it's like that. Your bid - for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity - will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world.
C.S. Lewis
Her eyes were of different colors, the left as brown as autumn, the right as gray as Atlantic wind. Both seemed alive with questions that would never be voiced, as if no words yet existed with which to frame them. She was nineteen years old, or thereabouts; her exact age was unknown. Her face was as fresh as an apple and as delicate as blossom, but a marked depression in the bones beneath her left eye gave her features a disturbing asymmetry. Her mouth never curved into a smile. God, it seemed, had withheld that possibility, as surely as from a blind man the power of sight. He had withheld much else. Amparo was touched—by genius, by madness, by the Devil, or by a conspiracy of all these and more. She took no sacraments and appeared incapable of prayer. She had a horror of clocks and mirrors. By her own account she spoke with Angels and could hear the thoughts of animals and trees. She was passionately kind to all living things. She was a beam of starlight trapped in flesh and awaiting only the moment when it would continue on its journey into forever.” (p.33)
Tim Willocks
God tests, but he does not tempt.
Criss Jami
Ik zou een héél boek willen schrijven over een kiezelsteen en over een paars viooltje. Ik zou met één enkele kiezelsteen heel lang kunnen leven en een gevoel kunnen hebben in Gods machtige natuur te leven.
Etty Hillesum
oh my soul...be prepared for him who knows how to ask questions
William Paul Young
people don't get meit's more rule than exceptionGod bless exceptions
Beth Myrle Rice
Every human being has divinity encased within its spirit and it is the task of its creator as well as itself to set it free. No human being is an end product, every being still breathing is a creation still under creation.
Toni Sorenson
God is not someone you meet when you die. His smiling face will be the first and the most familiar to greet you on the other side of mortality. You’ll recognize Him and know in your heart of hearts that you’re not entering a new sphere, but returning home to the place you’ve always belonged.
Toni Sorenson
I have to ask myself how I can possibly expect to know Jesus as he would want to be known if my life remains unscathed by trouble and grief. How can I hope to grasp anything of God's heart for this broken planet if I never weep because its brokenness touches me and breaks my heart? How can I reflect his image if I never share in his sufferings? And how will any of us ever learn to treasure his hesed and grace if we never experience phases where these blessings seem absent?
Carolyn Custis James
A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us.
Carl Sagan
I learned that one person hurting another really is like a hand curling into a fist to smash the foot. And that all that really matters is family and other people. And that the purpose of life is to find the Light of God, but not the light from some old guy with a beard sitting up there judging us. The light is the love we give each other on our way back home. And that God wouldn’t mind if we spent a little less time telling him how great he is and a little more time loving each other, and not just the people we’re supposed to love, but everyone.
Paul H. Magid
Strange how it is that men never act crueler than when they're fighting for the sake of an idea. We've been killing since Cain over who stands closer to god. It seems to me that cruelty is just in the way of things. You drive yourself mad if you take it all personal. Those who hurt you don't have the power over you they would like. That's why they do what they do.
Marcel Theroux
The trouble with me, he thought unhappily, is that I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form we expect and demand.
Ellis Peters