Quotes & Sayings About Divine Order

To become fully human means learning to turn my gratitude for being alive into some concrete common good. It means growing gentler toward human weakness. It means practicing forgiveness of my and everyone else's hourly failures to live up to divine standards. It means learning to forget myself on a regular basis in order to attend to the other selves in my vicinity. It means living so that "I'm only human" does not become an excuse for anything. It means receiving the human condition as blessing and not curse, in all its achingly frail and redemptive reality. — Brene Brown

I now let go of worn out things, worn out conditions, and worn out relationships. Divine order is now established and maintained in me and in my world. — Catherine Ponder

In order to cooperate in the material worlds as agents of a divine power, the spirits temporarily have a material body. By the work required in their corporeal lives, the spirits improve their intelligence and, by observing God's law, they acquire the merits which will lead them to eternal happiness. — Allan Kardec

Men have always looked before and after, and rebelled against the existing order. But for their divine discontent, men would not have been men, and there would have been no progress in human affairs. — Kabir

Every new day is a divine order. — Lailah Gifty Akita

From the beginning philosophy sought for The order behind the disorder Thales sipped cheap wine And in this did divine: Why it's nothing at all but pure water! — Rebecca Goldstein

The counsels of the Divine Mind had some glimpse of truth when they said that men are born in order to suffer the penalty for sins committed in a former life. — Marcus Tullius Cicero

Whether it's a pebble in a riverbed or a soaring mountain peak, I see everything in the world as the handiwork of the Lord. When I paint, I try to represent the beauty of God's creation in my art. Many modern painters see the world as a jumble of random lines and shapes with no divine beauty or order, and their works reflect their viewpoint. Because I see God's peacefulness, serenity, and contentment, I work to capture those feelings on the canvas. My vision of God defines my vision of the world. — Thomas Kinkade

From a still wider and more comprehensive point of view, universal life itself appears to us as a struggle between multiplicity and unity - a labor and an aspiration towards union. We seem to sense that - whether we conceive it as a divine Being or as a cosmic energy - the Spirit working upon and within all creation is shaping it into order, harmony, and beauty, uniting all beings (some willing but the majority as yet blind and rebellious) with each other through links of love, achieving - slowly and silently, but powerfully and irresistibly - the Supreme Synthesis. — Roberto Assagioli

When you feel the need to have the right person show up in your life, affirm: 'I know the right person is arriving in divine order at precisely the perfect time.' — Wayne Dyer

Sometimes,indeed, the Lord purposely leaves his children, withdraws the divine inflowings of his grace, and permits them to begin to sink, in order that they may understand that faith is not their own work.
(Sermon, "Mr. fearing comforted") — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer. — Virginia Woolf

Every religion in the world has had a subset of devotees who seek a direct, transcendent experience with God, excusing themselves from fundamentalist scriptural or dogmatic study in order to personally encounter the divine. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Philosophy should come to know the dimensions, qualities and quantities of the earth, the depths of the sea, the capacity of fire and the effects and nature of all these things in order to admire, revere and praise the divine artistry and intelligence. — Asclepius

You open the gates of the soul to let the dark flood of chaos flow into your order and meaning. If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness. — C. G. Jung

For not by art does the poet sing, but by power divine. Had he learned by rules of art, he would have known how to speak not of one theme only, but of all; and therefore God takes away the minds of poets, and uses them as his ministers, as he also uses diviners and holy prophets, in order that we who hear them may know them to be speaking not of themselves who utter these priceless words in a state of unconsciousness, but that God himself is the speaker, and that through them he is conversing with us. — Plato

The reason why I do not know anything about myself, the reason why Siddhartha has remained alien and unknown to myself is due to one thing, to one single thing
I was afraid of myself, I was fleeing from myself. I was seeking Atman, I was seeking Brahman, I was determined to dismember myself and tear away its layers of husk in order to find in its unknown innermost recess the kernel at the heart of those layers, the Atman, life, the divine principle, the ultimate. But in so doing, I was losing myself. — Hermann Hesse

Discipline is "the systematic management of your life to prepare and position you for your divine design." Discipline and stewardship are one and the same. Discipline brings order to life and is absolutely required if we're going to be good stewards of the call to leadership. — Kent Ingle

I find attempts to create bilingual gospels laughable, in particular the attempt to translate the service from Church Slavonic into Russian. What for? In order not to make the effort and not to learn the divine, if somewhat artificial but solemn, language specially carved for this purpose? This language also provides a link with a tradition which is realized at depths and which the modern Russian language cannot plumb. — Lyudmila Ulitskaya

Christ desires nothing so much as to redeem His heritage from the dominion of Satan. But before we are delivered from Satan's power without, we must be delivered {175} from his power within. The Lord permits trials in order that we may be cleansed from earthliness, from selfishness, from harsh, unchristlike traits of character. He suffers the deep waters of affliction to go over our souls in order that we may know Him and Jesus Christ whom He has sent, in order that we may have deep heart longings to be cleansed from defilement, and may come forth from the trial purer, holier, happier. Often we enter the furnace of trial with our souls darkened with selfishness; but if patient under the crucial test, we shall come forth reflecting the divine character. When His purpose in the affliction is accomplished, "He shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, and thy judgment as the noonday." Ps. 37:6. — Ellen G. White

We may regard the solar systems as separate sponges, swimming in a World of Divine Spirit, and thus it will be apparent that in order to travel from one solar system to another, it would be necessary to be able to function consciously in the highest vehicle of man, the Divine Spirit. — Max Heindel

But why is it so hard to forgive?' Mrs. Conners asked.
'Pride,' Dad said. 'This person has already wronged you in some way, and now you are the one who has to swallow your pride, give something up, in order to forgive him. — Bree Despain

Nothing that happened before this moment has any power over you whatsoever, except to the extent to which you carry it into this moment. Dwell in the present with full forgiveness of yourself and others, and your life will be lifted to divine right order ... perfection, prosperity and peace. — Marianne Williamson

The philosopher whose dealings are with divine order himself acquires the characteristics of order and divinity. — Plato

Christianity is not about the divine becoming human so much as it is about the human becoming divine. That is a paradigm shift of the first order. — John Shelby Spong

62. It is neither wise nor laudable to reduce everything to antiquity by every possible device. Thus, to cite some instances, one would be straying from the straight path were he to wish the altar restored to its primitive table form; were he to want black excluded as a color for the liturgical vestments; were he to forbid the use of sacred images and statues in Churches; were he to order the crucifixes designed that the Divine Redeemer's Body shows no trace of His cruel sufferings; lastly were he to disdain and reject polyphonic music or singing in parts, even where it conforms to regulations issued by the Holy See. — Pope Pius XII

In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding. — Roger D. Woodard

To say that God elects to fashion rational creatures in his image, and so grants them the freedom to bind themselves and the greater physical order to another master - to say that he who sealed up the doors of the sea might permit them to be opened again by another, more reckless hand - is not to say that God's ultimate design for his creatures can be thwarted. It is to acknowledge, however, that his will can be resisted by a real and (by his grace) autonomous force of defiance, or can be hidden from us by the history of cosmic corruption, and that the final realization of the good he intends in all things has the form (not simply as a dramatic fiction, for our edification or his glory, nor simply as a paedogogical device on his part, but in truth) of a divine victory. — David Bentley Hart

Is it not in accordance with divine order that every mortal is thrown into that situation where his hidden evils can be brought forth to his own view, that he may know them, acknowledge them, struggle against them, and put them away? — Anna Cora Mowatt

I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

A divine revelation should not consist only in uprooting us from the world's profanity in order to install us statically within a sacred world, in the bosom of which we could continue to lead almost the same life we led in the profane world. To enter into revelation is not merely to change objects as we do furniture. It is to be converted. Not to be converted once, but to be converted always. Sacred forms, rites, symbols and the Scriptures are basically conversion-makers, which means that we are never done with converting, never done with understanding, because they perplex and surpass all understanding. — Jean Borella

Judaism calls for us to honor the rhythm of human life, the demands of the human community around us, the call of the divine order as the filter and scale for the decisions that drive our own small lives. We do not rule the universe, Judaism reminds us. God does. We are not its standard or its norms. We are only its keepers, its agents, its stewards. To do right by the universe at large is the measure of a happiness framed with the entire cosmos in mind but lived in microcosms across time. — Joan D. Chittister

When man subverted order he did a great deal more than merely fall away from the rationality of his nature, diminish his own humanity, which is all that he does in Aristostle's ethics, nor he did merely compromise his destiny by an error, as it happens in the Plathonic myths; he brought disorder into the divine order, and presents the unhappy spectacle of a being in revolt against Being. [...] Every time a man sins he renews this act of revolt and prefers himself to God; in thus preferring himself, he separates himself from God; and in separating himself, he deprives himself of the sole end in which he can find beatitude and by that very fact condemns himself to misery. — Etienne Gilson

I am an expression of the divine, just like a peach is, just like a fish is. I have a right to be this way ... I can't apologize for that, nor can I change it, nor do I want to ... We will never have to be other than who we are in order to be successful ... We realize that we are as ourselves unlimited and our experiences valid. It is for the rest of the world to recognize this, if they choose. — Alice Walker

Our founders understood that divine authority was necessary in order to establish a ground on which the weak, the defenseless, the powerless, the poor and the wretched would be able to stand, in the face of every human power whatsoever, and demand respect for their human rights and dignity. — Alan Keyes

I trust in the ebb and flow of the universe. I trust that life's bigger than what I can see. I trust that there is a divine order beyond my control. And I trust that no matter what happens, I will be all right. — Oprah Winfrey

Suppose the hellfire of the orthodox really existed! We have no assurance that it does not! It seems incredible, but many incredible things are true. We do not know that God is not as cruel as a Spanish inquisitor. Suppose, then, He is! If, after Death, we wicked ones were shovelled into a furnace of fire- we should have to burn. There would be no redress. It would simply be the Divine Order of things. It is outrageous that we should be so helpless and so dependent on any one- even God. — W.N.P. Barbellion

In the year 1819 an act of Parliament was proposed limiting the labor of children nine years of age to four-teen hours a day. This would seem to have been a reasonable provision, likely to have won the approval of Christ; yet the bill was violently opposed by Christian employers, backed by Christian clergymen. It was interfering with freedom of contract, and therefore with the will of Providence; it was anathema to an established Church, whose function was in 1819, as it is in 1918, and was in 1918 B. C., to teach the divine origin and sanction of the prevailing economic order. — Upton Sinclair

Only humans have consciousness. It's divine order. That's why Allah hold us humans responsible fir our behavior. — Elif Shafak

Moyers: Then what does love have to do with morality?
Campbell: Violates it ... Insofar as love expresses itself, it is not expressing itself in terms of the socially approved manners of life. That's why it is all so secret. Love has nothing to do with social order. It is a higher spiritual experience than that of socially organized marriage ... Love was a divine visitation, and that's why it was superior to marriage. — Joseph Campbell

The divine is at the edge of our awareness and vision, but it is also within us as the first seeker found when all seemed lost completely. In order to find the dream of life again, we must first find the way that the dream exists within our own souls. We may be daunted by the surfacing of all the dilemmas and trouble of this troubled world, but the deep self and soul within us already knows how we are intended to swim in the blessed turmoil of the waters of life. For humans exist to bring meaning to the surface of life and awareness to the dream of existence. — Michael Meade

Yet the same thing happens to the notions of morality. They are devised, at the start, as measures of expediency, and then given divine sanction in order to lend them authority. — H.L. Mencken

God didn't create us with such a huge power of thought and a divine capacity for reason in order for us not to use them, — Hamlet Shakespeare

In order to get over the ethical difficulties presented by the naive naturalism of many parts of those Scriptures, in the divine authority of which he firmly believed, Philo borrowed from the Stoics (who had been in like straits in respect of Greek mythology), that great Excalibur which they had forged with infinite pains and skill - the method of allegorical interpretation. This mighty 'two-handed engine at the door' of the theologian is warranted to make a speedy end of any and every moral or intellectual difficulty, by showing that, taken allegorically or, as it is otherwise said, 'poetically' or, 'in a spiritual sense,' the plainest words mean whatever a pious interpreter desires they should mean. — Thomas Henry Huxley

There are persons who always believe in the imminent peril of the universe in general and of the Church of God in particular, and a sort of popularity is sure to be gained by always crying "Woe! Woe!" Prophets who will spiritually imitate Solomon Eagle, who went about the streets of London in the time of the plague, naked, with a pan of coals on his head, crying "Woe! Woe!" are thought to be faithful, though they are probably dyspeptic. We are not of that order: we dare not shut our eyes to the evils that surround us, but we are able to see the Divine power above us, and to feel it with us, working out its purposes of grace. We say to each of you what the Lord said to Joshua in the chapter we have just read, "Be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest." Our trust is in the living God, who will bring ultimate victory to His own cause. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Nobody is worthy to be loved. The fact that God loves man shows us that in the divine order of ideal things it is written that eternal love is to be given to what is eternally unworthy. Or if that phrase seems to be a bitter one to bear, let us say that everybody is worthy of love, except him who thinks he is. — Oscar Wilde

Some will be always strong, and some will be always weak; and though, if there is no God, no divine and fatherly source of order, there will be, trust me, no aristocracies, there will still be tyrannies. There will still be rich and poor; and that will then mean happy and miserable; and the poor will be--as I sometimes think they are already--but a mass of groaning machinery, without even the semblance of rationality; and the rich, with only the semblance of it, but a set of gaudy, dancing marionettes, which is the machinery's one work to keep in motion. — William Hurrell Mallock

And yet they are the most beautiful thing you have down there, bloody and cartilaginous, the very image of the female sex, fragrant with salt and seaweed. Typhus, typhus! They're dangerous as all gifts from the sea are; the sea offers death as well as immortality. In Syracuse I demanded that Orsi order them immediately. What flavor! How divine in appearance! My most beautiful memory of the last fifty years! — Giuseppe Tomasi Di Lampedusa

The kingdom of God is an order of government established by divine authority. It is the only legal government that can exist in any part of the universe. — Orson Pratt

The greater the charity of the Saints in their heavenly home, the more they intercede for those who are still on their journey and the more they can help them by their prayers; the more they are united with God, the more effective those prayers are. This is in accordance with Divine order, which makes higher things react upon lower things, like the brightness of the sun filling the atmosphere. — Thomas Aquinas

I personally believe in some sort of divine order - or energy. I do believe that everything happens for a reason. I do think that when something bad happens to someone it's with the purpose of awakening them. I do think there is some force behind that. I don't think there are accidents. — Gwyneth Paltrow

Some theologians claim that all God's desires culminate in a single desire: to assert and to maintain God's own glory. On its own, the idea of a glory-seeking God seems to say that God, far from being only a giver, is the ultimate receiver. As the great twentieth-century theologian Karl Barth disapprovingly put it, such a God would be "in holy self-seeking ... preoccupied with Himself"10. In creating and redeeming, such a God would give, but only in order to get glory; the whole creation would be a means to this end. In Luther's terms, here we would have a God demonstrating human rather than divine love. — Miroslav Volf

There are four on whose pots the Holy One, blessed he, knocked, only to find them filled with piss, and these are they: Adam, Cain, the wicked Balaam, and Hezekiah.
Again, an abrupt transposition from the divine to the domestic, from upper to lowly spheres, occurs in the midrash. The homely image of the Holy One knocking on pots apparently derives from the practice of tapping on a clay or earthen pot to hear its ring in order to decide if it is worthy of holding wine. In current Hebrew usage, the expression 'to assess or gauge someone's pot' still denotes taking in the measure of a person's character. From Adam's answer to God, we learn that he turned out to be a pisspot. — Shuli Barzilai

How is it that we do not die of love in seeing that God Himself could do no more than shed His divine blood for us drop by drop? When as man He was preparing for death, He made Himself our food in order to give us life. God becomes food, bread for his creatures. Is this not enough to make us die of love? — Teresa Of Avila

God does not only oppose the enemy of the divine from an external or superior standpoint, but also does the unthinkable: he exposes himself to Satan's fascination, in order to burst the dazzling bubble from within. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

And when it is suggested that the inward feelings of power or inward monitions or losses of judgement are the germs out of which the divine machinery developed, I return that truth is just the reverse, that the presence of voices which had to be obeyed were the absolute prerequisite to the conscious stage of mind in which it is the self that is responsible and can debate within itself, can order and direct, and that the creation of such a self is the product of culture. In a sense, we have become our own gods. — Julian Jaynes

THE POET A moody child and wildly wise Pursued the game with joyful eyes, Which chose, like meteors, their way, And rived the dark with private ray: They overleapt the horizon's edge, Searched with Apollo's privilege; Through man, and woman, and sea, and star, Saw the dance of nature forward far; Through worlds, and races, and terms, and times, Saw musical order, and pairing rhymes. Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

God would turn the world around to find suffering in order to give it to a soul upon whom He has set His Divine gaze with ineffable love. — Therese Of Lisieux

Listen--God only exists in people's minds. Especially in Japan, God's always been kind of a flexible concept. Look at what happened after the war. Douglas MacArthur ordered the divine emperor to quit being God, and he did, making a speech saying he was just an ordinary person. So after 1946 he wasn't God anymore. That's what Japanese gods are like--they can be tweaked and adjusted. Some American comping on a cheap pipe gives the order and presto change-o--God's no longer God. A very postmodern kind of thing. If you think God's there, He is. If you don't, He isn't.
~pages 286-287 — Haruki Murakami

I've always believed free will is a birthright. God even allows us to choose whether to be led by the divine order — Oprah Winfrey

The only power that can effect transformations of the order (of Jesus) is love. It remained for the 20th century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, the atom must be bombarded from without. So too, locked in every human being is a store of love that partakes of the divine- the imago dei, image of god ... And it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case, love's bombardment. The process begins in infancy, where a mother's initially unilateral loving smile awakens love in her baby and as coordination develops, elicits its answering smile ... A loving human being is not produced by exhortations, rules and threats. Love can only take root in children when it comes to them- initially and most importantly from nurturing parents. Ontogenetically speaking, love is an answering phenomenon. It is literally a response. — Huston Smith

Every ideal comes from us as do all the amenities of life, in order to make our existence as simple reproducers, for which divine Providence solely intended us, less monotonous and less hard. — Guy De Maupassant

It's Hard to order just a black coffee these days. That's the kind of miserable world we live in. — Andrew Barger

I give thanks that I am now rich, well and happy and that my financial affairs are in divine order. Every day in every way I am growing richer and richer. — Catherine Ponder

Divinity is not something supernatural that ever and again invades the natural order in a crashing miracle. Divinity is not in some remote heaven, seated on a throne. Divinity is love ... Wherever goodness, beauty, truth, love, are-there is the divine. — Harry Emerson Fosdick

Let the world unfold without always attempting to figure it all out. Let relationships just be, since everything is going to stretch out in Divine order. Don't try so hard to make something work - simply allow. Don't always toil at trying to understand your mate, your children, your parents, your boss, or anyone else because the Tao is working at all times. — Wayne Dyer

Ultimately, I see the Goddess as incorporating the full spectrum of existence, not just what we call 'the feminine.' The latter is actually a construct of a culture that divides existence into compartments, and in particular into the dualities with which we are so familiar: light/dark, female/male, mind/body, earth/spirit and so on.

The true nature of existence, including true human nature, I believe, is not so split. Acting and living from the integration of all these components is what I call spirituality. Thus, the Goddess represents a unity and wholeness which is the birthright and potential of every human being. All of us, all of existence, are the Divine. In order to complete this whole by bringing back that which has been denied, I name the Divine the Goddess. — Hallie Iglehart Auste

Do you want to know something from the beyond? Do you want to chat with divine beings face to face? It is indispensable to enter into the region of the dead at will, to visit the celestial regions, to know other worlds of the infinite space. Outside of the physical body, one can give to himself the luxury of invoking beloved relatives who already passed through the doors of death. They will concur to our call, then we can personally chat with them ... When out of the physical body, we can acquire complete knowledge about the mysteries of death and life. Out of the physical body, we can invoke the angels in order to talk personally with them face to face. — Samael Aun Weor

The Secret of Enlightenment is not in Perfection but in Completeness. Everything that is below the Abyss carries the imperfection within.
After the Infinite establishes Divine Order, the Life of Duality as we know it on Earth begins. It is Yin and Yang in its Manifestation, and only through the two meeting, marrying, merging, they both reach God.' Ama Alchemy of Love by Nuit Quote — Natasa Nuit Pantovic

When you see a heron eating an innocent rabbit, what comes to your mind? Do you say 'What a great order God has created?' or you say 'What a devilish horror is going on here!' Question your beliefs! If the strong eats the weak, there is absolutely nothing divine in here, but there is only injustice and nightmare! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

[W]hat made Christians especially dangerous to the Roman order was their refusal to pay what Romans regarded as ordinary respect to their Roman rulers; and this brought some of them into direct and total opposition to the temporal as well as the divine authorities - to the emperors and to their divine patrons, the gods. — Elaine Pagels

We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature [ ... ]. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine. — Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola

religion is a method of self-governance which allows a culture or civilization to invoke its own order by divine mandate. — Tom Watson

Regularity in Nature is not proof of the control of Nature by a Divine intelligence; it is rather the reverse. If something- call it matter, or ether, or x - exists, it must operate in accordance with its innate qualities; and so long as this x remains uncontrolled, its manifestations will continue unchallenged- in other words, there will be order. The same causes, the same results. That is the manifest signs of a natural order that knows nothing of God. — Chapman Cohen

It is only through meditation that we can get lasting peace, divine peace. If we meditate soulfully in the morning and receive peace for only one minute, that one minute of peace will permeate our whole day. And when we have a meditation of the highest order, then we really get abiding peace, light and delight. We need meditation because we want to grow in light and fulfill ourselves in light. If this is our aspiration, if this is our thirst, then meditation is the only way. — Sri Chinmoy

Faith, in order to be genuine and of any real value, must be the offspring of that divine love which Jesus manifested when He prayed for His enemies on the cross. — Hosea Ballou

No matter is too complex for the healing impact of divine mind. Divine mind arranges everything to its highest order. What lies within you knows how to act and when to act. Tuned to divine mind, you have an unshakable inner clarity that makes proper and appropriate choices. Your good is assured. — Julia Cameron

People will often, almost always, prefer a male God. A male image of God gives them this sense of security, safety, order, no nonsense. So that's where their psyche is at. Probably it's something that they've got to go through. Not that there isn't a need for order in the world, but the mystical level seems to be the mature level of religion, and there the question is not order but union - divine union. And so, without some integration of the feminine, usually you never get to the mystical level. — Richard Rohr

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded creation. Commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use it, to creatively order it ... They are environmentalists. Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be anything else or to deny their divine responsibility to care for all that God has made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence. This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues. — Rob Bell

The punishment of murder by death is contrary to reason, and to the order and happiness of society, and contrary to divine revelation. — Benjamin Franklin

Many theologians believe the Gospel writers include miracle stories in order to prove that Jesus is divine. But miracles are not proof of deity. Many Old Testament prophets heal people and even raise them from the dead, yet they are mere mortals. Jesus's miracle ministry is a demonstration that the kingdom of God has arrived. Heaven on Earth, pg. 105. — R. Alan Streett

The one book necessary to be understood by a divine, is the Bible; any others are to be read, chiefly, in order to understand that. — Francis Lockier

The end of man is God, an end obviously exceeding the limits of reason. Yet man should have some knowledge of his end in order to regulate and order his intentions and actions towards that end. The salvation of man, therefore, demands that divine revelation should make him know a certain number of truths quite beyond the grasp of his reason.43 In other words, since man requires knowledge of the infinite God, who is his end, and since such knowledge exceeds the limits of his reason, he simply must get it by way of faith. Nor does such faith do violence to our reason. Rather, faith in the incomprehensible confers on rational knowledge its perfection and consummation. — Etienne Gilson

Creative people have to be fed from the divine source. I have to get fed. I had to get filled up in order to pour out. — Johnny Cash

Listen to any musical phrase or rhythm, and grasp it as a whole, and you thereupon have present in you the image, so to speak, of the divine knowledge of the temporal order. — Josiah Royce

We also have to give up the notion of a divine savior, which has nothing to do with what religion we belong to, but refers to the idea of someone or something who will save us without our having to go through any pain. In fact, giving up that kind of false hope is the first step. We have to be with ourselves. We have to be real people. There is no way of beating around the bush, hoping for the best. If you are really interested in working with yourself, you can't lead that kind of double life, adopting ideas, techniques, and concepts of all kinds, simply in order to get away from yourself. — Chogyam Trungpa

The discrepancy is that the ethical self should be found immanently in the despair, that the individual won himself by persisting in the despair. True, he has used something within the category of freedom, choosing himself, which seem to remove the difficulty, one that presumably has not struck many, since philosophically doubting everything and then finding the true beginning goes one, two, three. But that does not help. In despairing, I use myself to despair, and therefore I can indeed despair of everything by myself. But if I do this, I cannot come back by myself. It is in this moment of decision that the individual needs divine assistance, whereas it is quite correct that in order to be at this point one must first have understood the existence-relation between the aesthetic and the ethical; that is to say, by being there in passion and inwardness, one surely becomes aware of the religious - and of the leap. — Soren Kierkegaard

Everything is not black-and-white. I'm really interested in the gray area - not justifying it, not glorifying it, not condoning it, but at least having people see there's a genesis for every event in our lives. There's some divine order to it, whether it's ugly or beautiful. — Isaiah Washington

A man comes forth in Israel to make today's prophetic vision tomorrow's agenda; one for whom the teachings of Mount Sinai do not suffice because he wishes to penetrate beyond to the original divine intent; one who, despite war and tyranny, dares to pursue the biblical love of neighbor to its ultimate consequence in order to brand all our souls with an ideal of human possibility that no longer allows us to be content with the threadbare, run-of-the-mill persons we are but need not be. — Pinchas E. Lapide

Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists. — Joseph De Maistre

In order to love others, we have to love ourselves deeply enough, to be able to forgive ourselves and become responsible, with self respect and dignity. This self love is Divine Love, for oneself and for all. — Gian Kumar

It took me many years to lose my spirit, to unlearn thinking and forget the unity. Isn't it just as if I had turned about slowly and was on a long detour from being a man to being a child, from a thinker to a childlike person? And yet, this path has been very good, and the bird in my chest has not died. But what a path this has been! I had to pass through so much stupidity, so many vices, so many errors, so much disgust, so many disappointments and woes just to begin again. But it was fitting this way; my heart says "Yes" to it and my eyes smile at it. I've had to experience despair. I've had to descend to the most foolish of all thoughts
the thought of suicide
in order to be able to experience divine grace, to hear "Om" again, to be able to sleep and awaken properly again [ ... ] Where else might my path lead me? This path is foolish; it moves in loops, and perhaps it is going around in a circle. Let it go where it likes; I want to follow it. — Hermann Hesse

The majority of people are not awake; it is only here and there that we find one even partially awake. Practically all of us, as a result, are living lives that are unworthy almost the name of lives, compared to those we might be living, and that lie within our easy grasp. While it is true that each life is in and of Divine Being, hence always one with it, in order that this great fact bear fruit in individual lives, each one must be conscious of it; he or she must know it in thought, and then live continually in this consciousness. — Ralph Waldo Trine

You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen. — Nia Long

I believe that we are conforming to the divine order and the will of Providence when we are doing even indifferent things that belong to our condition. — Francois Fenelon

We are rooted in an imperfect, unfinished, and evolving 'web' of natural processes. Novelty rather than order is the nature of the 'divine'. — Gary D. Bouma

Marcion: The God of the Old Testament and Jesus in the New Testament are two different gods. Docetists: Jesus only appeared to be human. Arius: The Son was a created being of a lower order than the Father. Apollinarius: Jesus' divine nature/Logos replaced the human rational soul in the incarnation. In other words, Jesus' "pure" divine nature replaced the "filthy" mind of a typical human. Sabellius: Jesus and the Father are not distinct but just "modes" of a single being. Eutyches: The divinity of Christ overwhelms his humanity. Nestorius: Jesus was composed of two separate persons, one divine and one human. — Justin S. Holcomb

All love craves unity. As the highest peak of love in the human order is the unity of husband and wife in the flesh, so the highest unity in the Divine order is the unity of the soul and Christ in communion. — Fulton J. Sheen

The higher orders [of angels] are presumed to be closer in their nature to God and to function in roles that serve God more directly than the lower orders, which tend to the administration of the physical universe and the service of humankind. Some orders are associated with particular divine qualities - Seraphim with Love, Cherubim with Wisdom, Thrones with Judgment. — David Connolly

The real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. — John Cleese