Quotes by Philosophers - Page 346

Though the ancient poet in Plutarch tells us we must not trouble the gods with our affairs because they take no heed of our angers and disputes, we can never enough decry the disorderly sallies of our minds.
Michel de Montaigne
A steampunk nationBaby pollution rises up then the loving comes arraigning 'causeOur art's official and only partially artificialAnd our heart's in the middle of sharp hardened shards of metal butThere's not where it settlesBecause it's beating to the steaming of God's hottest pot or kettleAnd now we face it, this creation we made toTo save our craving for a synthetic rebelnation it'sOur safeway they make into a pathetic revelationIn our steampunk nationOur steampunk nation
Criss Jami
New struggles. -- After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries -- a colossal, horrible shadow. God is dead, but given the way people are, there may still be caves for millennia in which his shadow is displayed. -- And we -- we must still defeat his shadow as well!
Friedrich Nietzsche
Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
The worst mockery God can make of a moralist is that He compels him to be asolipsist.
Kedar Joshi
Life is a question asked by God about the way he exists.
Kedar Joshi
No matter what God's power may be, the first aspect of God is never that of the absolute Master, the Almighty. It is that of the God who puts himself on our human level and limits himself.
Jacques Ellul
I revere the word of God for I love its poetic force. I loathe the word of God for I hate its cruelty. The love is a difficult love for it must incessantly separate the luminosity of the words and the violent verbal subjugation by a complacent God. The hatred is a difficult hatred for how can you allow yourself to hate words that are part of the melody of life in this part of the world? Words that taught us early on what reverence is?
Pascal Mercier
Whoever extolleth him as a God of love, doth not think highly enough of love itself. Did not that God want also to be judge? But the loving one loveth irrespective of reward and requital.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Please, dear God of happiness, show the radiance of your spectrum to our world, which here means to forget everything.
Sorin Cerin
Does anybody know which are the thoughts of God, even if they are plants, mountains, sky, stars or whatever else?
Sorin Cerin
Can I tell from the twilight from which the world is built that I am a sunrise in this life?
Sorin Cerin
Once we are a creation, how much absurdity can there be in our heart without God the Creator.
Sorin Cerin
But saints and angels behold that glory of God which consists in the beauty of His holiness; and it is this sight only that will melt and humble the hearts of men, wean them from the world, draw them to God, and effectually change them. A sight of the awful greatness of God may overpower men's strength, and be more than they can endure; but if the moral beauty of God be hid, the enmity of the heart will remain in its full strength. No love will be enkindled; the will, instead of being effectually gained, will remain inflexible. But the first glimpse of the moral and spiritual glory of God shining into the heart produces all these effects as it were with omnipotent power, which nothing can withstand.
Jonathan Edwards
O Lord, I am further away from me than from You!
Sorin Cerin
But that is the nature of true grace and spiritual light, that it opens to a person's view the infinite reason there is that he should be holy in a high degree. And the more grace he has, and the more this is opened to view, the greater sense he has of the infinite excellency and glory of the divine Being, and of the infinite dignity of the person of Christ, and the boundless length and breadth and depth and height of the love of Christ to sinners. And as grace increases, the field opens more and more to a distant view, until the soul is swallowed up with the vastness of the object, and the person is astonished to think how much it becomes him to love this God and this glorious Redeemer that has so loved man, and how little he does love. And so the more he apprehends, the more the smallness of his grace and love appears strange and wonderful: and therefore he is more ready to think that others are beyond him.
Jonathan Edwards
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
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
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
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
God tests, but he does not tempt.
Criss Jami
People try to persuade us that the objections against Christianity spring from doubt. That is a complete misunderstanding. The objections against Christianity spring from insubordination, the dislike of obedience, rebellion against all authority. As a result, people have hitherto been beating the air in their struggle against objections, because they have fought intellectually with doubt instead of fighting morally with rebellion.
Søren Kierkegaard
Is it not the same distance to God everywhere?
Epictetus
Reason in man is rather like God in the world.
Thomas Aquinas
As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.
Criss Jami
Man has 2 common problems with God: the one is that there is evil in the world; the other is that free will is limited. The one, he is charging that the world is too evil; the other is that it is not evil enough.
Criss Jami
In our worldly perceptions of Jesus, we tend to embrace the kindness of his love ('be encouraged') but not the discipline of his love ('and sin no more'). But with the whole scope of his love, or maturity in Christ, we begin relying on him for guidance where we would prefer him to walk beside us rather than behind us.
Criss Jami
Religion, like science, is only noteworthy when it emphasizes a matter of what is true rather than whose belief is greater or lesser or which deity works for whom. Sincere religion and tested science are similar in that their assertions can be argued logically and objectively; otherwise, we get false cults and babble.
Criss Jami
When you find that a theology has nothing more to offer than what the world already offers, then that theology as a theology is impractical, and therefore, useless.
Criss Jami
S'il n'existait pas Dieu il faudrait l'inventer." (If God did not exist he would have to be invented.)
Voltaire
...he said firmly, "God can help you. All the men I’ve seen in your position turned to Him in their time of trouble." "Obviously," I replied, "they were at liberty to do so, if they felt like it." I, however, didn’t want to be helped, and I hadn’t time to work up interest for something that didn’t interest me.
Albert Camus
God, listen to the absurdity within us and raise us from the illusion!
Sorin Cerin
Morality is everywhere the same for all men, therefore it comes from God; sects differ, therefore they are the work of men.
Voltaire
We have to believe in a God who is like the true God in everything except that he does not exist, since we have not reached the point where God exists.
Simone Weil
There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
Simone Weil
And what we say - that what He willeth is right and what He doth not not will is wrong, is not so to be understood, as if, should God will something inconsistent, it would be right because He willed it. For it does not follow that if God would lie it would be right to lie, but rather that he were not God.
Anselm of Canterbury
There's no need to curse God if you're an ugly duckling. He chooses those strong enough to endure it so that they can guide others who've felt the same.
Criss Jami
The faithful man perceives nothing less than opportunity in difficulties. Flowing through his spine, faith and courage work together: Such a man does not fear losing his life, thus he will risk losing it at times in order to empower it. By this he actually values his life more than the man who fears losing his life. It is much like leaping from a window in order to avoid a fire yet in that most crucial moment knowing that God will appear to catch you.
Criss Jami
Faithfulness imparts God's reason for all circumstances. No matter what the world says, losing is no longer an option.
Criss Jami
Religion is based on the idea that God is an imbecile.
Noam Chomsky
There is but One God, His name is Truth, He is the Creator, He fears none, he is without hate, He never dies, He is beyond the cycle of births and death, He is self illuminated, He is realized by the kindness of the True Guru. He was True in the beginning, He was True when the ages commenced and has ever been True, He is also True now.
Guru Nanak
God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.
Niccolò Machiavelli
How would this world be if there was not God? The answer is simple: it would become itself God.
Sorin Cerin
The love of Christ is always there and unchanging, no matter what we do, but it is when we are obedient that we actually begin to feel it.
Criss Jami
I'm always talking to God about whether or not he exists - that's how I know I'm a theist.
Criss Jami
God is a circle whose center is everywhere, and its circumference nowhere.
Empedocles
If God did not exist, He would have to be invented. But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
Voltaire
The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
Albert Camus
If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
G.K. Chesterton
The problem of vindicating an omnipotent and omniscient God in the face of evil is insurmountable. Those who claim to have surmounted it, by recourse to notions of free will and other incoherencies, have merely heaped bad philosophy onto bad ethics.
Sam Harris
If we cannot find our way to a time when most of us are willing to admit that, at the very least, we are not sure whether or not God wrote some of our books, then we need only count the days to Armageddon—because God has given us far many more reasons to kill one another than to turn the other cheek.
Sam Harris
For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything.
G.K. Chesterton
Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.
T.F. Hodge
If we rely on anything else besides faith to maintain the practice of the presence of God, we will certainly fail, whether this is our feelings, or experiences, or sincerity, or good intentions, or reasonings, or plans. The reason these things will fail while faith will not fail is that all these things depend on us, while faith depends on God. It is a gift of God.
Peter Kreeft
Your Mercy is my social status.
Guru Nanak
He who exercises wisdom, exercises the knowledge which is about God.
Epictetus
Of all the major religions, or lack thereof, the atheist's is one of the best pretenders: his foundation for all existences, as well as moral behaviors for the permanent good of mankind, begins at science but ends at himself, the Napoleon complex of both intelligence and imagination. On the other hand the anti-theist wouldn't survive without a deity beyond himself to hunt. He doesn't pretend, he simply nullifies his own position.
Criss Jami
The typical atheist rebels against God as a teenager rebels against his parents. When his own desires or standards are not fulfilled in the way that he sees fit, he, in revolt, storms out of the house in denial of the Word of God and in scrutiny of a great deal of those who stand by the Word of God. The epithet 'Heavenly Father' is a grand reflection, a relation to that of human nature.
Criss Jami
What gave you this idea of an imperfect god?''I don't know. It seems quite feasible to me. That is the only god I could imagine believing in, a god whose passion is not a redemption, who saves nothing, fulfills no purpose--a god who simply is.
Stanisław Lem
If the gods have determined about me and about the things which must happen to me, they have determined well, for it is not easy even to imagine a deity without forethought; and as to doing me harm, why should they have any desire towards that? For what advantage would result to them from this or to the whole, which is the special object of their providence? But if they have not determined about me individually, they have certainly determined about the whole at least, and the things which happen by way of sequence in this general arrangement I ought to accept with pleasure and to be content with them.
Marcus Aurelius