Creation Of Man Quotes & Sayings

This Bible, then, has a mission, grander than any mere creation of God; for in this volume are infinite wisdom, and infinite love. Between its covers are the mind and heart of God; and they are for man's good, for his salvation, his guidance, his spiritual nourishment. If now I neglect my Bible, I do my soul a wrong; for the fact of this Divine message is evidence that I need it. — Abbott Eliot Kittredge

The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation. — Thomas Hobbes

This is the beauty of the Qur'an: it asks you to reflect and reason, and not to worship the sun or moon but the One who has created everything. The Qur'an asks man to reflect upon the sun and moon and God's creation in general. — Cat Stevens

If you've a notion of what man's heart is, wouldn't you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man's frantic and frightened attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something awful? And that this 'awful' part of himself might not be as awful as he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do with it? We talk about what to do with the atom bomb ... But man's heart, his spirit is the deadliest thing in creation. Are not all cultures and civilizations just screens which men have used to divide themselves, to put between that part of themselves which they are afraid of and that part of themselves which they wish, in their deep timidity, to try to preserve? Are not all of man's efforts at order an attempt to still man's fear of himself? — Richard Wright

Western teaching institutions that refuse to acknowledge today's taboos are by definition subversive. Tell the new zealots of Washington that in the making of Israel a monstrous human crime was committed and they will call you an anti-Semite. Tell them there was no Garden of Creation and they will call you a dangerous cynic. Tell them God is what man invented to compensate for his ignorance of science and they will call you a Communist. — John Le Carre

The concept of encounter also enables us to make clearer the important distinction between talent and creativity. Talent may well have its neurological correlates and can be studied as "given" to a person. A man or woman may have talent whether he or she uses it or not; talent can probably be measured in the person as such. But creativity can be seen only in the act. If we were purists, we would not speak of a "creative person," but only of a creative act. — Rollo May

Man may rest in the eternal fitness; he may abide in the everlasting; and roam from the beginning to the end of all creation. He may bring his nature to a condition of ONE, he may nourish his strength; he may harmonise his virtue, and so put himself into partnership with God. — Zhuangzi

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. — Carl Sagan

But a child, so recently come into the world from the void of creation, can be more resilient than the strongest man, more strong willed than the hardiest woman. A child is like an early spring bulb that carries all the resources needed within its skin for the first push through the soil towards the sun. And just as a little bit of water can start the bulb to grow, even through fissured rock, so can a little kindness give a child the ability to push through the dark. — Kathleen Kent

Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service. The iMac is not just the color or translucence or the shape of the shell. The essence of the iMac is to be the finest possible consumer computer in which each element plays together. — Steve Jobs

The devil can quote Scripture for his purpose; and the text of Scripture which he now most commonly quotes is, "The Kingdom of heaven is within you." That text has been the stay and support of more Pharisees and prigs and self-righteous spiritual bullies than all the dogmas in creation; it has served to identify self-satisfaction with the peace that passes all understanding. And the text to be quoted in answer to it is that which declares that no man can receive the kingdom except as a little child. What we are to have inside is a childlike spirit; but the childlike spirit is not entirely concerned about what is inside. It is the first mark of possessing it that one is interested in what is outside. The most childlike thing about a child is his curiosity and his appetite and his power of wonder at the world. We might almost say that the whole advantage of having the kingdom within is that we look for it somewhere else. — G.K. Chesterton

Respect for life and for the dignity of the human person also extends to the rest of creation, which is called to join man in praising God. — Pope John Paul II

WITCHES LIVED AND WERE BURNED LONG BEFORE the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population, and their suppression marks one of the opening struggles in the history of man's suppression of women as healers. The other side of the suppression of witches as healers was the creation of a new male medical profession, under the protection and patronage of the ruling classes. This new European medical profession played an important role in the witch hunts, supporting the witches' persecutors with "medical" reasoning: — Barbara Ehrenreich

[A]bove all, it has been the Qur'anic notion of the universe, as an expression of Allah's will and creation, that has inspired in diverse Muslim communities, generations of artists, scientists and philosophers? Scientific pursuits, philosophic inquiry and artistic endeavour are all seen as the response of the faithful to the recurring call of the Qur'an to ponder the creation as a way to understand Allah's benevolent majesty. As Sura al-Baqara proclaims: 'Wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah.'"

His Highness the Aga Khan's 2003 Address to the International Colloquium 'Word of God, Art of Man: The Qur'an and its Creative Expressions' organised by The Institute of Ismaili Studies (London, United Kingdom) — Aga Khan

It is important to insist on the historical truthfulness of the narrative of the fall of Adam and Eve. Just as the account of the creation of Adam and Eve is tied in with the rest of the historical narrative in the book of Genesis, so also this account of the fall of man, which follows the history of man's creation, is presented by the author as straightforward, narrative history — Wayne Grudem

For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men- and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man. This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man. For monks are not a special sort of men, but only what all men ought to be. Only through that knowledge, our heart grows soft with infinite, universal, inexhaustible love. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

All doctrines relating to the creation of the world, the government of man by superior beings, and his destiny after death, are conjectures which have been given out as facts, handed down with many adornments by tradition, and accepted by posterity as "revealed religion". They are theories more or less rational which uncivilised men have devised in order to explain the facts of life, and which civilised men believe that they believe. — William Winwood Reade

Reorientation means an emphasis on the dignity of man, not on the sanctity of property. It means the creation of a society where human misery and poverty are repugnant to that society, not an indication of laziness or lack of initiative. The creation of new values means the establishment of a society based on free people, not free enterprise. — Stokely Carmichael

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets:
Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it! — William Hutchison Murray

All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence
of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied. — George MacDonald

All this convinced him that he had come to one of those revolting havens where pathetic depravity makes its abode, born of tawdry education and the terrible populousness of the capital. One of those havens where man blasphemously crushes and derides all the pure and holy that adorns life, where woman, the beauty of the world, the crown of creation, turns into some strange, ambiguous being, where, along with purity of soul, she loses everything feminine and repulsively adopts all the mannerisms and insolence of a man, and ceases to be that weak, that beautiful being so different from us. — Nikolai Gogol

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: "The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation." That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system. Imagine if some doctor in turn-of-the-century Vienna had declared: "The intention that Man should have a healthy body is not in the plan of Creation." We'd probably lock him up, or at least strip him of his medical license. We certainly wouldn't base our entire medical system on his ideas. Yet that is exactly what we did with Freud. — Eric Weiner

Man's Chief purpose ... is the creation and preservation of values; that is what gives meaning to our civilization, and the participation in this is what gives significance, ultimately, to the individual human life. — Lewis Mumford

She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself - believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all. — George MacDonald

Anyone who refuses to marry is shrinking his farmwork, wasting the seed, and leaving idle the appropiate tools created by God; he sins against the purpose of creation and wisdom visible in the evidence of natural structure. The man who refuses to marry has severed a chain of being, a previously unbroken chain linking his own existence to that of Adam. — Al-Ghazali

Science is a capital or fund perpetually reinvested; it accumulates, rolls up, is carried forward by every new man. Every man of science has all the science before him to go upon, to set himself up in business with. What an enormous sum Darwin availed himself of and reinvested! Not so in literature; to every poet, to every artist, it is still the first day of creation, so far as the essentials of his task are concerned. Literature is not so much a fund to be reinvested as it is a crop to be ever new-grown. — John Burroughs

Society considers the sex experiences of a man as attributes of his general development, while similar experiences in the life of a woman are looked upon as a terrible calamity, a loss of honor and of all that is good and noble in a human being. This double standard of morality has played no little part in the creation and perpetuation of prostitution. It involves the keeping of the young in absolute ignorance on sex matters, which alleged "innocence," together with an overwrought and stifled sex nature, helps to bring about a state of affairs that our Puritans are so anxious to avoid or prevent. — Emma Goldman

If evolutionism were to be rejected, the whole structure upon which the modern world is based would collapse and one would have to accept the incredible wisdom of the Creator in the creation of the multiplicity of life forms which we see on the surface of the earth and in the seas. This realization would also change the attitude that modern man has concerning the earlier periods of his own history, vis-a-vis other civilizations and also other forms of life. Consequently the theory of evolution continues to be taught in the West as a scientific fact rather than a theory and whoever opposes it is usually brushed off as religious obscurantist. — Seyyed Hossein Nasr

O SON OF MAN! I loved thy creation, hence I created thee. Wherefore, do thou love Me, that I may name thy name and fill thy soul with the spirit of life. — Baha'u'llah

Since God is the end of man, since he has created us to be perfect and happy in him, it is manifest that if the designs of creation have not here below been entirely frustrated, there should be found men who tend to their end in seeking and loving God. And nevertheless, because of human liberty, there should also be found other men who neglect God, their principle and their end, and yield to the seduction of created things. Such indeed is the spectacle which the history of the world unceasingly presents to us. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

Hence it is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. And he who by nature and not by mere accident is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity; he is like the Tribeless, lawless, hearthless one, whom Homer denounces - the natural outcast is forthwith a lover of war; he may be compared to an isolated piece at draughts. — Aristotle.

The soul is an embryo in the body of Man, and the day of death is the Day of awakening, for it is the Great era of labour and the rich Hour of creation. — Khalil Gibran

Only God was able to create a free creature, and freedom could only arise by the act of creation. Freedom is not the result or product of evolution. Freedom and product are disparate ideas. God does not produce or construct. He creates. We used to say the same for artists, for the artist who constructs does not create a personality but rather a poster of man. A personality cannot be constructed. Maybe sooner or later, during this century or after a million years of continued civilization, man will succeed in constructing an imitation of himself, a kind of robot or monster, something similar to its constructor. This human-looking monster may look very much like man, but one thing is certain: it will never have freedom. Without a divine touch, the result of evolution would not have been man, but rather a developed animal, a super-animal, a creature with a human body and intelligence but without a heart and personality. — Alija Izetbegovic

Here is a man who was resigned to his fate, who was walking to the scaffold and about to die like a coward, that's true, but at least he was about to die without resisting and without recriminations. Do you know what gave him that much strength? Do you know what consoled him? It was the fact that another man was to die like him, that another man was to die before him! Put two sheep in the slaughter-house or two oxen in the abattoir and let one of them realize that his companion will not die, and the sheep will bleat with joy, the ox low with pleasure. But man, man whom God made in His image, man to whom God gave this first, this sole, this supreme law, that he should love his neighbour, man to whom God gave a voice to express his thoughts - what is man's first cry when he learns that his neighbour is saved? A curse. All honour to man, the masterpiece of nature, the lord of creation! — Alexandre Dumas

Idle Jeffrey, when asking his cousin for money: "I fear I have not a mercenary tendency."

The Chancellor of the Exchequer and his cousin, Plantagenet Palliser: "Men must have mercenary tendencies or they would not have bred. The man who plows, so he may live, does so because, luckily, he has mercenary tendencies."

Jeffrey: "Just so, but you see I am less lucky than the plowman."

Palliser: "There is no vulgar error so vulgar, that is to say common or erroneous, as that by which men have been taught to say that mercenary tendencies are bad. The desire for wealth is the source of all progress. Civilization comes from what men call greed. Let your mercenary tendencies be combines with honesty, and they cannot take you astray. — Anthony Trollope

The truth is in Jesus and it leads to the fullness of truth about God, man, creation, history, sin, righteousness, grace, faith, salvation, life, death, purpose, meaning, relationships, heaven, hell, judgement, eternity, and everything else of ultimate consequence. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

God is love;' Creation is the outflow of love. Redemption is the sacrifice and the triumph of love. Holiness is the fire of love. The beauty of the life of Jesus is love. All we enjoy of the Divine we owe to love. Our holiness is not God's is not Christ's, if we do not love.
[ ... Again, faith works by love]:
"For in Jesus Christ neither circumcision availeth any thing, nor uncircumcision; but faith which worketh by love" (Galatians 5:6, KJV).
Faith has all its worth from love, from the love of God, whenever it draws and drinks, and the love to God and man which streams out of it. Let us be strong in faith, then shall we abound in love. — Andrew Murray

Self-realization is a process of permanent auto-creation, an elaboration of the new man at the expense of the old. — Nikolai Berdyaev

A professor at the University of Michigan said to me: "As soon as we create life in a test tube, we won't need God anymore." I answered: "This happened once before when man ruled God out and proposed the Tower of Babel. It ended in frustration, confusion, and judgment. — Billy Graham

Osama, baah!" Bashir roared.
"Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever. — Greg Mortenson

An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves. For a man who does not believe in a miracle, a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one. The Greek witch may have turned sailors to swine with a stroke of the wand. But to see a naval gentleman of our acquaintance looking a little more like a pig every day, till he ended with four trotters and a curly tail, would not be any more soothing. It might be rather more creepy and uncanny. — G.K. Chesterton

I would say that I am a poor Christian; I'm not a believer. It was this idea very early in my life that life on Earth, nature or man could not be a creation of a merciful God. — Lars Von Trier

I despise the zeal of the devout, but I have never said that the One is two.
I am not one of those for whom faith is simply fear of judgement. How do I pray? I study a rose, I count the stars, I marvel at the beauty of the creation and how perfectly ordered it is, at man, the most beautiful work of the Creator, his brain thirsting for knowledge, his heart for love, and his senses, all his senses alert or gratified. — Amin Maalouf

Man becomes not the lord and master of all creation but he is its servant. — Mahatma Gandhi

How shrunk, how dwindled, in our times
Creation's mighty seed -
For Man has broke the Fellowship
With murder, lust, and greed. — Margaret Atwood

The Lord commands us to do good unto all men without exception, though the majority are very undeserving when judged according to their own merits ... [The Scripture] teaches us that we must not think of man's real value, but only of his creation in the image of God to which we owe all possible honor and love. — John Calvin

J. R. R. Tolkien, the near-universally-hailed father of modern epic fantasy, crafted his magnum opus The Lord of the Rings to explore the forces of creation as he saw them: God and country, race and class, journeying to war and returning home. I've heard it said that he was trying to create some kind of original British mythology using the structure of other cultures' myths, and maybe that was true. I don't know. What I see, when I read his work, is a man trying desperately to dream.
Dreaming is impossible without myths. If we don't have enough myths of our own, we'll latch onto those of others - even if those myths make us believe terrible or false things about ourselves. Tolkien understood this, I think because it's human nature. Call it the superego, call it common sense, call it pragmatism, call it learned helplessness, but the mind craves boundaries. Depending on the myths we believe in, those boundaries can be magnificently vast, or crushingly tight. — N.K. Jemisin

The hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too ... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature ... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side. — Francis A. Schaeffer

History was finite and contained within comprehensible limits. It began with the Creation and was scheduled to end in a not indefinitely remote future with the Second Coming, which was the hope of afflicted mankind, followed by the Day of Judgment. Within that span, man was not subject to social or moral progress because his goal was the next world, not betterment in this. In this world he was assigned to ceaseless struggle against himself in which he might attain individual progress and even victory, but collective betterment would only come in the final union with God. — Barbara W. Tuchman

Marriage is a partnership. Someone has observed that in the Bible account of the creation woman was not formed from a part of man's head, suggesting that she might rule over him, nor from a part of a man's foot that she was to be trampled under his feet. Woman was taken from man's side as though to emphasize the fact that she was always to be by his side as a partner and companion. — Harold B. Lee

Then the LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. 6The LORD was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart. The LORD said, I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, from man to animals to creeping things and to birds of the sky; for I am sorry that I have made them. — Anonymous

Only now is the child finally divested of all that he has been. His origins are become remote as is his destiny and not again in all the world's turning will there be terrains so wild and barbarous to try whether the stuff of creation may be shaped to man's will or whether his own heart is not another kind of clay. — Cormac McCarthy

We live at a time when man believes himself fabulously capable of creation, but he does not know what to create. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

It was the whole Trinity, which at the beginning of creation said, "Let us make man". It was the whole Trinity again, which at the beginning of the Gospel seemed to say, "Let us save man". — J.C. Ryle

The foundation of religion is not the affirmation that God is, but that God is concerned with man and the world; that, having created the world, he has not abandoned it, leaving it to its own devices; that he cares for his creation. — Eliezer Berkovits

The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium. — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

These systems attempt to box God into a government confined within the perspective of man. Yet when humanity is used as the starting point for interpreting and interacting with God's creation, faulty theology and sociology emerge as mankind attempts to fashion God into the image of man. — Tony Evans

He supposed he was one of those unfortunates born with a great capacity for suffering ... He opened his eyes a moment and they were dark with fear, for only one race was run as yet and there might be many others ... Then his newborn courage came back to him and he accepted his suffering as the price he must pay for the gift of creation that was his. And suffering, he had discovered, could be the gateway to renewal, than which no more glorious experience can be man's on earth. — Elizabeth Goudge

I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born. — Thomas Robert Malthus

Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the — Virginia Woolf

Yea, I thought it impossible that ever I should attain to so much goodness of heart, as to thank God that He had made me a man. Man indeed is the most noble by creation, of all creatures in the visible world; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc. I blessed their condition; for they had not a sinful nature; they were not obnoxious to the wrath of God; they were not to go to hell-fire after death; I could therefore have rejoiced, had my condition been as any of theirs. — John Bunyan

So says the most ancient book of the Earth; thus it is written on its leaves of marble, lime, sand, slate, and clay: ... that our Earth has fashioned itself, from its chaos of substances and powers, through the animating warmth of the creative spirit, to a peculiar and original whole, by a series of preparatory revolutions, till at last the crown of its creation, the exquisite and tender creature man, was enabled to appear. — Johann Gottfried Herder

The Greeks, or more correctly the Athenians, invented the idea of theatre, as they invented so many other social and cultural institutions which the west then came to take for granted. There is nothing self-evident about the idea of theatre, of plays and players through whom private individuals, lacking priestly or other authority, publicly examined man's fate and commented on it by a poetic play which, despite the many traditional elements, was in its essential qualities a creation of the playwright. — Moses I. Finley

Never choose the card a man wants you to. Mat should have realized that. It was one of the oldest cons in creation. — Robert Jordan

All existence for a man turned away from the eternal is but a vast mime under the mask of the absurd. Creation is the great mime ... it is itself an absurd phenomenon. — Albert Camus

Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced.
For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do. — Tiffany Madison

Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays. — Louis Pasteur

It was during the Renaissance that creativity was first seen, not as a matter of divine inspiration, but as a gift of a great learned man to imitate God's ability to create. As Prometheus stole the fire of the Gods and brought it to the mankind, humanity needed to steal the secret of 'creation' from Gods and understand its essence. — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

The sum of the knowable, that soil which the human spirit must till, lies between all the languages and independent of them, at their center. But man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his own modes of cognition and feeling, in other words: subjectively. Just where study and research touch the highest and deepest point, just there does the mechanical, logical use of reason - whatever in us can most easily be separated from our uniqueness as individual human beings - find itself at the end of its rope. From here on we need a process of inner perception and creation. And all that we can plainly know about this is its result, namely, that objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality. — Wilhelm Von Humboldt

Very sacred is the vocation of the artist, who has to do directly with the works of God, and interpret the teaching of creation to mankind. All honor to the man who treats it sacredly; who studies, as in God's presence, the thoughts of God which are expressed to him; and makes all things according to the pattern which he is ever ready to show to earnest and reverent genius on the mount. — Jason 'J' Brown

No myth of miraculous creation is so marvelous as the face of man's evolution. — Robert Briffault

Although we credit God with designing man, it turns out He's not sufficiently skilled to have done so. In point of fact, He unintentionally knocked over the first domino by creating a palette of atoms with different shapes. Electron clouds bonded, molecules bloomed, proteins embraced, and eventually cells formed and learned how to hang on to one another like lovebirds. He discovered that by simmering the Earth at the proper distance from the Sun, it instinctively sprouted with life. He's not so much a creator as a molecule tinkerer who enjoyed a stroke of luck: He simply set the ball rolling by creating a smorgasbord of matter, and creation ensued. — David Eagleman

THE MAGIC OF MAKING A START Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now. — Steven Pressfield

Man is a masterpiece of creation ... — Georg C. Lichtenberg

No man-made law ever, no matter whether derived from the past or projected onto a distant, unforeseeable future, can or should ever be empowered to claim that it is greater than the Natural Law from which it stems and to which it must inevitably return in the eternal rhythm of creation and decline of all things natural. — Wilhelm Reich

Darwin was not afraid to look deeply into the void. His bold view can be seen as either noble and pessimistic or noble and admirable. For people of science, he is a hero. Denying man a privileged place in creation, .. he reaffirms with his own intellectual courage the dignity of man. — Primo Levi

[He] looked up and imagined the hand of God flinging stars like shining dust across the heavens. No. He was wrong to think such pagan thoughts, for God had only to utter a word and it was done. Only man had He shaped with His hands, using the dust He created to form His most precious and amazing creation. Only man was molded and loved into being, the breath of life in his lungs given by God. — Francine Rivers

For after all, what is man in creation? Is he not a mere cipher compared with the infinite, a whole compared to the nothing, a mean between zero & all, infinitely remote from understanding of either extreme? Who can follow these astonishing processes? The Author of these wonders understands them, but no one else can. — Blaise Pascal

Everything in nature is a puzzle until it finds its solution in man, who solves it in some way with God, and so completes the circle of creation. — Theodore T. Munger

I have no sympathy with the belief that art is the restricted province of those who paint, sculpt, make music and verse. I hope we will come to an understanding that the material used is only incidental, that there is artist in every man; and that to him the possibility of development and of expression and the happiness of creation is as much a right and as much a duty to himself, as to any of those who work in the especially ticketed ways. — Robert Henri

Conversion is a work above man's power ... Never think you can convert yourself. If ever you would be savingly converted, you must despair of doing it in your own strength. It is a resurrection from the dead, a new creation, a work of absolute omnipotence ... This is a supernatural work. — Joseph Alleine

The metaphor is perhaps one of man's most fruitful potentialities. Its efficacy verges on magic, and it seems a tool for creation which God forgot inside one of His creatures when He made him. All our faculties keep us within the realm of the real, of what is already there. The most we can do is to combine things or break them up. The metaphor alone furnishes an escape; between the real things, it lets emerge imaginary reefs, a crop of floating islands. — Jose Ortega Y Gasset

She had turned thought and feeling into life, into reality, into creation. They speak of the _creations_ of the human intellect, of the human imagination! there is nothing man can do comes half so near the making of the Maker as the ordering of his way--except one thing: the highest creation of which man is capable, is to will the will of the Father. That _has_ in it an element of the purely creative, and then is man likest God. But simply to do what we ought, is an altogether higher, diviner, more potent, more creative thing, than to write the grandest poem, paint the most beautiful picture, carve the mightiest statue, build the most worshiping temple, dream out the most enchanting commotion of melody and harmony. — George MacDonald

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God's creation, woman, the object of our lust. — Mahatma Gandhi

The Creator did not speak man into existence as He did all else which He made, but He began with previously made material. So in the restoration process He did not speak the restoration into reality by fiat. Rather He began the process through a series of connected acts and events. And certainly no act of the Eternal Creator would ever be without purpose or reason. — Dr. J. Otis Yoder

Christianity is not just involved with "salvation", but with the total man in the total world. The Christian message begins with the existence of God forever, and then with creation. It does not begin with salvation. We must be thankful for salvation, but the Christian message is more than that. Man has a value because he is made in the image of God. — Francis A. Schaeffer

God's Creation - fulfillment of love;
Man's creation - fulfillment of want — Munindra Misra

He was becoming something the world had never seen before - a dream animal - living at least partially within a secret universe of his own creation and sharing that secret universe in his head with other, similar heads. Symbolic communication had begun. Man had escaped out of the eternal present of the animal world into a knowledge of past and future. The unseen gods, the powers behind the world of phenomenal appearance, began to stalk through his dreams. — Loren Eiseley

The man form is higher than the angel form; of all forms it is the highest. Man is the highest being in creation, because he aspires to freedom. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Don't the overwhelming majority believe that mankind is the crowning achievement of Creation, that man is better than everything, even things we haven't yet investigated? And don't those people who aren't able to escape the bonds of their own ego think that the entire Universe, even the countless worlds of outer space, is just a backdrop for this ego? And yet it might be quite different. — Adalbert Stifter

Conservatism, we are told, is out-of-date. This charge is preposterous and we ought to boldly say so. The laws of God, and of nature, have no dateline. [ ... ] These principles are derived from the nature of man, and from the truths that God has revealed about His creation. [ ... ] To suggest that the Conservative philosophy is out of date is akin to saying that the Golden Rule, or the Ten Commandments or Aristotle 's Politics are out of date. — Barry Goldwater

Is not prayer also a study of truth,
a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learningsomething. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into creation. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

When the author of Genesis says that God made man in His own image, he may have pictured a vaguely corporeal God making man as a child makes a figure out of plasticine. A modern Christian philosopher may think of a process lasting from the first creation of matter to the final appearance on this planet of an organism fit to receive spiritual as well as biological life. But both mean essentially the same thing. Both are denying the same thing - the doctrine that matter by some blind power inherent in itself has produced spirituality. GOD IN THE DOCK "Dogma and the Universe — C.S. Lewis

Look, look,' cried the count, seizing the young man's hands - look, for on my soul it is curious. Here is a man who had resigned himself to his fate, who was going to the scaffold to die - like a coward, it is true, but he was about to die without resistance. Do you know what gave him strength? - do you know what consoled him? It was, that another partook of his punishment - that another partook of his anguish - that another was to die before him. Lead two sheep to the butcher's, two oxen to the slaughterhouse, and make one of them understand that his companion will not die; the sheep will bleat for pleasure, the ox will bellow with joy. But man - man, who God created in his own image - man, upon whom God has laid his first, his sole commandment, to love his neighbour - man, to whom God has given a voice to express his thoughts - what is his first cry when he hears his fellowman is saved? A blasphemy. Honour to man, this masterpiece of nature, this king of the creation! — Alexandre Dumas

To draw close to Divinity is to come to appreciate man as a divine creation, for "If men do not comprehend the character of God, they do not comprehend themselves" (Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, 343). — Robert L. Millet

Man can hardly even recognize the devils of his own creation. — Albert Schweitzer

For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is - limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death - He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile. — Dorothy L. Sayers

The central conception of Man in the Gospels is that he is an unfinished creation capable of reaching a higher level by a definite evolution which must begin by his own efforts. — Maurice Nicoll

It is evident that the state is a creation of nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. — Aristotle.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for them to dwell in or resort to. So it is with man. A hundred years ago they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very aspect of those primitive and rugged trees there was, methinks, a tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good thickness, and we no longer produce tar and turpentine. — Henry David Thoreau