Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: October 10, 2019 06:56PM
I am afraid to own a Body --
I am afraid to own a Soul --
Profound -- precarious Property --
Possession, not optional --
Double Estate -- entailed at pleasure
Upon an unsuspecting Heir --
Duke in a moment of Deathlessness
And God, for a Frontier.
--Emily Dickinson--
It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist; that the soul should be joined to the body, and that we should have no soul; that the world should be created, and that it should not be created, etc; that original sin should be, and that it should not be.
--Blaise Pascal--
--Pensees--
God enters by a private door into every individual.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson--
--"Intellect"--
But God's own descent
Into flesh was meant
As a demonstration
that the supreme merit
Lay in risking spirit
In substantiation.
--Robert Frost--
--"Kitty Hawk"--
And if we obey God, we must disobey ourselves; and it is in this disobeying ourselves, wherein the hardness of obeying God consists.
--Herman Melville--
--Moby Dick--
The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways --I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows.
--Plato--
--Socrates in Apology--
It is I, the ungodly Zarathustra, who saith: "who is ungodlier than I, that I may enjoy his teaching?"
--Friedrich Nietzsche--
--Thus Spake Zarathustra--
I should only believe in a God that would know how to dance.
--Friedrich Nietzsche--
--Thus Spake Zarathustra--
Whoever thinks that the understanding of things Divine rests upon strict proofs has in his thought narrowed down the wideness of God's mercy.
--Al-Ghazali--
--Deliverance from Error--
It seem'd like Omnipresence! God, methought,
Had built him there a Temple: the whole World
Seem'd imag'd in its vast circumference:
No wish profan'd my overwhelmed heart.
Blest hour! It was a luxury, -- to be!
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge--
--"Reflections on having Left a Place of Retirement"--
It has been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect that he can dispense with a creator.
--Marcel Proust--
(I love Proust's irony. Clever fellow, that guy.)
It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion, as is unworthy of him: for the one is unbelief, the other is contumely: and certainly superstition is the reproach of the deity.
--Francis Bacon--
--"Of Superstition"--
Of Course -- I prayed --
And did God Care?
He cared as much as on the Air
A Bird -- had stamped her foot --
And cried "Give Me" --
My Reason -- Life --
I had not had -- but for Yourself --
'Twere better Charity
To leave me in the Atom's Tomb --
Merry, and Nought, and gay, and numb --
Than this smart Misery.
--Emily Dickinson--
"Politics is action and all action is but a flaw in the Perfection of inaction, which is peace, just as all being is but a flaw in the perfection of non-being. Which is God. For if God is perfection and the only perfection is in nonbeing, then God is nonbeing. Then God is nothing. Nothing can give no basis for the criticisms of Thing in its thingness. Then where do you get anything to say?"
--Robert Penn Warren--
--All the King's Men--
"I can't help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say 'Glory'; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say 'Amen'; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking."
--Billy Bray--
--As quoted by William James--
--Varieties of Religious Experience--
When a pious relative who asked him if he made peace with God, Thoreau replied, "I am not aware that we ever quarreled."
And then some...
Human