Quotes by Philosophers - Page 180

If free will means to do what you want, then it does not exist. Many of its staunchest proponents have met the wheel of fate without opposing it
Bangambiki Habyarimana
Fate is not in man but around him
Albert Camus
Fate's arrow, when expected, travels slow.
Dante Alighieri
Fate is nothing but the deeds committed in a prior state of existence.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
[T]his readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game's outcome.
Slavoj Žižek
Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God's grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.
Peter Kreeft
There is no question of doing is purely on our own. But we must act. Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. And it is well-directed, decisive, and sustained effort that is the key to the keys of the kingdom and to the life of restful power in ministry and life that those keys open to us.
Dallas Willard
The inmost significance of the exaggerated value which is set upon hard work appears to be this: man seems to mistrust everything that is effortless; he can only enjoy, with a good conscience, what he has acquired with toil and trouble; he refused to have anything as a gift.
Josef Pieper
If you, free as you are of every weighthad stayed below, then that would be as strangeas living flame on earth remaining still."And then she turned her gaze up toward the heavens.
Dante Alighieri
Insofar as the intervention of grace constitutes the core of religious experience, the constant aim of every religious movement ought to be a reduction of transcendence coupled with an unswerving dedication to immanence. Let metaphysics and science pursue the elaboration of transcendent, causal economies; the domain of religion is immanence and, more precisely, the immanence of what is actually given as a gift. Religious thinking will be religious in character precisely to the extent that it is capable of faithfully thinking immanence. Religion, for the sake of grace, forsakes transcendence.
Adam Miller
Typically, images or paintings are designated as anamorphic when, in order for the image to appear, a particular line of sight must be adopted. The image only shows up when approached from the angle dictated to the viewer by the image's own set of conditions. In this sense, the viewer must 're-form' their perspective to match the perspective demanded by the image. We are not free to approach the image as we wish; the image is free to assign us a perspective proper to itself... Anamorphosis, then, describes the freedom of the phenomenon to give itself as it wishes and it measures the extent to which this freedom turns the tables on the one to whom it appears. To receive a phenomenon as it wishes to give itself is to yield control and suspend our own timetables and preconditions in order to be faithful to the conditions set by what gives itself.
Adam Miller
For dismissed by You from Paradise, and having taken my journey into a far country, I cannot by myself return, unless Thou meetest the wanderer: for my return has throughout the whole tract of this world's time waited for Your mercy.
Augustine of Hippo
Grace is the beauty of form under the influence of freedom.
Friedrich Schiller
Indeed we also work, but we are only collaborating with God who works, for his mercy has gone before us. It has gone before us so that we may be healed, and follows us so that once healed, we may be given life; it goes before us so that we may be called, and follows us so that we may be glorified; it goes before us so that we may live devoutly, and follows us so that we may always live with God: for without him we can do nothing.
Augustine of Hippo
If Christ be a fraud, he was among the most peculiar yet brilliant of frauds in saying that only he was the way, the truth, and the life. This is the importance of grace - some people think that simply being nice and not harming others is morality; others think that following rules and tithing are morality. But without Christ, all moral beliefs ultimately boil down to the one sin which perpetually rails against the concept of grace: man's lawful, religious, and futile attempt at establishing his own righteousness.
Criss Jami
The conscious attempt to be a good person without Christ is as legalistic as an attempt to make it into Heaven through empty religiosity.
Criss Jami
Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted.
Paul Tillich
432In the end, grace may prove irresistible, but love can never be forced. Augustine knew this.
James Wetzel
It is neither just the religious, the spiritual, the power-hungry, the evil, the ignorant, the corrupt, the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Jew, nor the atheist that makes a hypocrite, but being a human being. Any man who thinks himself to be free of hypocrisy while committed to cherry-picking others for such, I am confident, the Almighty can prove to him a great deal of his own hypocrisy even beyond his earthly comprehension.
Criss Jami
What we fail to realize is we often become like Pharisees in our ruthless attempts to identify Pharisees (and impostors). While indeed some people use the old laws of religious pride to tear down men of God, others use the new laws of anti-religious anger to tear down men of God.
Criss Jami
For certain he hath seen all perfectnessFor certain he hath seen all perfectness. Who among other ladies hath seen mine: They that go with her humbly should combine To thank their God for such peculiar grace. So perfect is the beauty of her face That it begets in no wise any sign Of envy, but draws round her a clear line Of love, and blessed faith, and gentleness. Merely the sight of her inakes all things bow: Not she herself alone is holier Than all: but hers, through her, are raised above. From all her acts such lovely graces flow That truly one may never think of her Without a passion of exceeding love.
Dante Alighieri
The example of Jesus Christ is the only perfect example that ever existed in human nature. It is therefore, a rule by which to try all other examples; and the dispositions, frames and practices of others, must be commended and followed no further than they were followers of Christ.
Jonathan Edwards
The Fates and Furies, as well as the Graces and Sirens, glide with linked hands over life.
Jean Paul Friedrich Richter
All can be done if the god-touch is there
Sri Aurobindo
Grace doesn't grease the wheels of the law. Grace isn't God's way of jury rigging a broken law. It's the other way around. The law is just one small cog in a world animated entirely--from top to bottom, from beginning to end--by grace.
Adam S. Miller
Sin acts as if God's original plan was for us to bootstrap ourselves into holiness by way of the law and then, when this didn't quite pan out, God offered his grace--but only the bare minimum--to make good the difference. This is exactly backwards. God's boundless grace comes first and sin is what follows.
Adam S. Miller
We live in an age so legalistic, we find it hard to imagine someone wanting to obey their Lord simply because they love their God.
Criss Jami
If you are not there for other people, do not expect them to be there for you. In many a case one might conclude that this is part of God's sovereign justice. His grace, however, is that He Himself will always be there for you, no matter what.
Criss Jami
You can never escape God's Grace because as you run from it, you run to it.
Gift Gugu Mona
The winds of grace are blowing all the time, but it is you that must raise your sails.
Rabindranath Tagore
The central thesis of Surnaturel, then, is that, neither in patristic nor in medieval theology, and certainly not in Thomas Aquinas, was the hypothesis ever entertained of a purely natural destiny for human beings, something other than the supernatural and eschatological vision of God. There is only this world, the world in which our nature has been created for a supernatural destiny. Historically, there never was a graceless nature, or a world outside the Christian dispensation. This traditional conception of human nature as always destined for grace-given union with God fell apart between attempts, on the one hand, to secure the sheer gratuitousness of the economy of grace over against the naturalist anthropologies of Renaissance humanism and, on the other hand, resistance to what was perceived by Counter-Reformation Catholics as the Protestant doctrine of the total corruption of human nature by original sin. The Catholic theologians, who sought to protect the supernatural by separating it conceptually from the natural, facilitated the development of the humanism which flowered at the Enlightenment into deism, agnosticism and ultimately atheism. The conception of the autonomous individual for which the philosophers of the Age of Reason were most bitterly criticized by devout Catholics was, de Lubac suggested, invented by Catholic theologians. The philosophers which broke free of Christianity, to develop their own naturalist and deist theologies, had their roots in the anti-Protestant and anti-Renaissance Catholic Scholasticism of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Fergus Kerr
Though sometimes conflicted and seemingly restricted - grace be [the] wings of clarity.
T.F. Hodge
The ingenerating of a principle of grace in the soul seems in Scripture to be compared to the conceiving of Christ in the womb... And the conception of Christ in the womb of the blessed virgin by the power of the Holy Ghost, seems to be a designed resemblance of the conception of Christ in the soul of a believer by the power of the same Holy Ghost.
Jonathan Edwards
Some people's theologies come across as blatantly wrong when weighed against what is revealed in Scripture. However God has mercy on those who may be wrong but genuinely seek understanding before seeking themselves.
Criss Jami
Grace is the seed of glory, the dawning of glory in the heart, and therefore grace is the earnest of the future inheritance.
Jonathan Edwards
It is not that we keep His commandments first and that then He loves but that He loves us and then we keep His commandments. This is that grace which is revealed to the humble but hidden from the proud.
Augustine of Hippo
The Divine Light is always in man, presenting itself to the senses and to the comprehension, but man rejects it.
Giordano Bruno
This is one of the goals of the Jewish way of living: to experience commonplace deeds as spiritual adventures, to feel the hidden love and wisdom in all things.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
When rich, being poor seems *adventurous.*
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
Out of every one hundred men, ten shouldn't even be there, eighty are just targets, nine are the real fighters, and we are lucky to have them, for they make the battle. Ah, but the one, one is a warrior, and he will bring the others back.
Heraclitus of Ephesus
Of all modern notions, the worst is this: that domesticity is dull. Inside the home, they say, is dead decorum and routine; outside is adventure and variety. But the truth is that the home is the only place of liberty, the only spot on earth where a man can alter arrangements suddenly, make an experiment or indulge in a whim. The home is not the one tame place in a world of adventure; it is the one wild place in a world of rules and set tasks.
G.K. Chesterton
The supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born ... by the act of being born, we step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words ... we step into a fairy-tale.
G.K. Chesterton
People spend their entire lives at those lower altitudes without any awareness that this high country exists.
Robert M. Pirsig
Always remember that when a new moment, a new insight, hovers around you, choose the new because the old has not done anything for you, so what is the point of going back? Even if the new proves wrong, then too, choose the new. At least it will be a new adventure; you will come to know something.
Osho
He had always wanted to write music, and he could give no other identity to the thing he sought. If you want to know what it is, he told himself, listen to the first phrases of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto - or the last movement of Rachmaninoff's Second. Men have not found the words for it nor the deed nor the thought, but they have found the music. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Let me see it made real. Let me see the answer to the promise of that music. Not servants nor those served; not altars and immolations; but the final, the fulfilled, innocent of pain. Don't help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Don't work for my happiness, my brothers --- show me yours --- show me that it is possible --- show me your achievements --- and the knowledge will give me courage for mine.
Ayn Rand
We are but faint-hearted crusaders...our expeditions are but tours...half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walks, perchance, in the spirit of stirring adventure, never to return, --prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms...if you have paid your debts and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.
Henry David Thoreau
Trudging alone along that black road, sometimes in the teeth of wind and rain, and watching the white distant gleam of convolvulus through the park railings, gave me an exhilarating sensation of adventure.
Simone de Beauvoir
I will go forth as a real outlaw," he said, "and as men do robbery on the highway I will do right on the highway; and it will be counted a wilder crime.
G.K. Chesterton
For an occurrence to become an adventure, it is necessary and sufficient for one to recount it.
Jean-Paul Sartre
To venture causes anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one's self.... And to venture in the highest is precisely to be conscious of one's self.
Søren Kierkegaard
An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.
G.K. Chesterton
Poetry creates the myth, the prose writer draws its portrait.
Jean-Paul Sartre
There is only one thing that you write for yourself, and that is a shopping list.
Umberto Eco
A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
A writer is merely a reader that had the guts to be read, and, heard.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
There are more writers who read than readers who write.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
To put an arrogant 'famous' writer in his place: pretend to be illiterate.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana
In writing, the point is not to manifest or exalt the act of writing, nor is it to pin a subject within language; it is, rather, a question of creating a space into which the writing subject constantly disappears.
Michel Foucault
Sometimes it is the reader that sucks, not the book.
Mokokoma Mokhonoana