God S Absence Quotes & Sayings

Play is an expression of God's presence in the world; one clear sign of God's absence in society is the absence of playfulness and laughter. — Mike Yaconelli

The law of God, as quite plainly expressed in woman's construction, is this: There shall be no limit put upon your intercourse with the other sex sexually, at any time of life. During twenty-three days in every month (in the absence of pregnancy) from the time a woman is seven years old till she dies of old age, she is ready for action, and competent. As competent as the candlestick is to receive the candle. Competent every day, competent every night. Also, she wants that candle
yearns for it, longs for it, hankers after it, as commanded by the law of God in her heart. — Mark Twain

Tim Minchin's musings on Tony, the first 'fish' ever to have feet:
Imagine what Tony would think, standing there on his brand new feet on the brink of the beginnings of mankind as we know it ... if he could look forward just a few short ... hundreds of millions of years ... to see one of his descendants ... an Israeli Jew by the name of Jesus, having a nail hammered through his feet ... the very feet that Tony provided him with, as a punishment for having a, sort of, schizophrenic discourse with a God who was created by Mankind to explain the existence of feet in the absence of the knowledge of the existence of Tony. — Tim Minchin

But the Platonists never argued that evil's lack of ultimate reality meant that there was no moral evil in the world. Plato was well aware of wars, murders, and lies. Evil exists, but it exists as a lack of good, just as holes in a Swiss cheese exist only as lack of cheese. The evil of a lie is the absence of truth. Plato did not think that the nonbeing of evil removed evil from the world, only that it removed responsibility for evil from the creator. Evil arose not from the God, but from matter. — Jeffrey Burton Russell

Faithfulness is not holding the fort. It's storming the gates of hell and taking back enemy territory that belongs to God.

I'm afraid we've reduced righteousness to the absence of wrongness, but goodness is not the absence of badness. You can do nothing wrong and still do nothing right. Remember the parable of the bags of gold? Breaking even is bad. You've got to ante up everything. — Mark Batterson

Across the world millions of lives are altered by the absence of the dead, but three members of Teddy's last crew - Clifford the bomb-aimer, Fraser, the injured pilot, and Charlie, the tail-end Charlie - all bail out successfully from F-Fox and see out the rest of the war in a POW camp. On their return they all marry and have children, fractals of the future. — Kate Atkinson

The principles of storytelling are immutable, explaining why we see shards of ourselves in other people's stories. All enduring stories predicate its themes upon humankind's ability to exercise free will. Without a character's ability to make choices of how to act, there can be no story. In absence of free will, there is no humanity. Only after God evicted them from the Garden of Eden, could Adam and Eve experience what it means to be human. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Do not write. I am sad, and want my light put out.
Summers in your absence are as dark as a room.
I have closed my arms again. They must do without.
To knock at my heart is like knocking at a tomb.
Do not write!
Do not write. Let us learn to die, as best we may.
Did I love you? Ask God. Ask yourself. Do you know?
To hear that you love me, when you are far away,
Is like hearing from heaven and never to go.
Do not write!
Do not write. I fear you. I fear to remember,
For memory holds the voice I have often heard.
To the one who cannot drink, do not show water,
The beloved one's picture in the handwritten word.
Do not write!
Do not write those gentle words that I dare not see,
It seems that your voice is spreading them on my heart,
Across your smile, on fire, they appear to me,
It seems that a kiss is printing them on my heart.
Do not write! — Louis Simpson

The gospel isn't merely the absence of all condemnation; it's also the fullness of God's delight lavished on us in Christ. — Scotty Smith

My wisdom absent of God's wisdom is nothing more than a best-guess. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

And yet when I wish to explore how faith works, I usually sneak in by the back door of doubt, for I best learn about my own need for faith during its absence. God's invisibility guarantees I will experience times of doubt. Everyone dangles on a pendulum that swings from belief to unbelief, back to belief, and ends - where? — Philip Yancey

Before I knew it, my daily schedule had started to look a lot like this:

Monday: Woke up, thought of Ryder; went to school, stared at Ryder; had lunch with J, gaped at Ryder; went to PE, brooded over Ryder's absence; went home, thought of Ryder; took a drive "accidentally" passing by Dave's Garage, spied on Ryder; came home, thought of Ryder; had dinner, no appetite due to lack-of Ryder; went to bed, tossed and turned thinking about Ryder.
Tuesday: See above, with minor adjustments.
Wednesday: Ryder wasn't in school, my world collapsed
Thursday: Same as Monday and Tuesday
Friday: See above.
Saturday: Nightmarishly long, boring. Drove by Dave's Garage twice, hoping to see Ryder.
Sunday: See above, minus the drive-by. But, yay, tomorrow I'll see Ryder in school! God bless Mondays. — Ramona Wray

Hell is God's Absence. — Edmund White

The goal of life is not the absence of pain. It's the presence of glory. God's glory. And sometimes that comes most vividly with pain. Not only have I learned that pain doesn't kill; I have learned that I will never lose or be betrayed by the one thing with absolute power to destroy me - God Himself. — Beth Moore

When I think of the years when I had no faith, what I am struck by, first of all, is how little this lack disrupted my conscious life. I lived not without God, nor wish his absence, but in a mild abeyance of belief, drifting through the days on a tide of tiny vanities - a publication, a flirtation, a strong case made for some weak nihilism - nights all adagios and alcohol as my mind tore luxuriously into itself. I can see now how deeply God's absence affected my unconscious life, how under me always there was this long fall that pride and fear and self-live at once protected me from and subjected me to. Was the fall into belief or into unbelief? Both. For if grace woke me to God's presence in the world and in my heart, it also woke me to his absence. I never truly felt the pain of unbelief until I began to believe. — Christian Wiman

Hope is not defined by the absence of hardship. Rather, hope is found in God's grace in the midst of hardship. Hope is found in his promise to give us a future. — Stuart Scott

As long as kashay's (anger, pride, deceit, greed) do not go away, you have not attained God's religion even a little bit. Religion of the vitarags [the enlightened ones] means absence of kashay (anger, pride, deceit, greed). — Dada Bhagwan

Until recent times, absence of evidence for his [Jehovah's] existence has not been sufficient to rule him out. However, we now have enough knowledge that we can identify many places where there should be evidence, but there is not. The absence of that evidence allows us to rule out the existence of this God beyond a reasonable doubt. — Victor J. Stenger

Audacity isn't the absence of uncertainty and ambiguity. Audacity is believing that God's promise is bigger than my 'perhaps' — Steven Furtick

Part of the inner world of everyone is this sense of emptiness, unease, incompleteness, and I believe that this in itself is a word from God, that this is the sound that God's voice makes in a world that has explained him away. In such a world, I suspect that maybe God speaks to us most clearly through his silence, his absence, so that we know him best through our missing him. — Frederick Buechner

Whether the pain you face now is the consequence of your sin or the sin of others, in God's providence and in saving faith, Romans 8:28 still reigns: "God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose." It is not the absence of sin that makes you a believer. It is the presence of Christ in the midst of your struggle that commends the believer and sets you apart in the world. — Rosaria Champagne Butterfield

YOU MUSTN'T BE AFRAID OF DEATH
you're a deathless soul
you can't be kept in a dark grave
you're filled with God's glow
be happy with your beloved
you can't find any better
the world will shimmer
because of the diamond you hold
when your heart is immersed
in this blissful love
you can easily endure
any bitter face around
in the absence of malice
there is nothing but
happiness and good times
don't dwell in sorrow my friend
ghazal number 2594 — Rumi

God's faithfulness is proved not by the elimination of hardships but by carrying us through them. Change is not the absence of struggles; change is the freedom to choose holiness in the midst of our struggles. I realized that the ultimate issue has to be that I yearn after God in total surrender and complete obedience. — Christopher Yuan

Persecution always acts as a jell for members of cults; it proves to them, in the absence of history, liturgy, tradition, and doctrine, that they are God's chosen. — Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

[T]hat finally is the questions, that is the anguish
to abide in God's hiddenness is one thing, to abide in God's absence is altogether something else. — Lauren F. Winner

But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, "If God does not exist, everything is permitted." Today's believers use this formula for their own advantage. To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, and his victories as well. — Simone De Beauvoir

In the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of God's existence. — Isaac Newton

The absence of inner intent for kashays is the same as the inner intent of the absolute Self (Parmatma). If one's kashays are gone, then he becomes the 'owner' of the whole universe. — Dada Bhagwan

While the burning fish is tracing his arc
near the cypress, beneath the highest blue of all,
and the blind boy flies away in the white stone,
and the ivory poem of the green cicada
beats and reverberates in the elm,
let us give honor to the Lord
the black mark of his good hand
who has arranged for silence in all this noise.
Honor to the god of distance and of absence,
ff the anchor in the sea - the open sea ...
He frees us from the world - it's everywhere
he opens roads for us to walk on.
With our cup of darkness filled to the brim,
with our heart that always knows some hunger,
let us give honor to the Lord who created the zero
and carved our thought out of the block of faith. — Antonio Machado

O MAN! Offer Thy labyrinthine longings into a monotheistic bonfire consecrated to the unparalleled God.
Burn desire for human affection in the fire of aspiration for GOD alone, a love solitary because omnipresent!
Throw faggot of ignorance to incandesce the blaze of insight! Devour all sorrows in the sorrow for God's absence.
Consume all regrets in meditative bliss! — Paramahamsa Yogananda

We tell each other things that have no relation to the afternoon's events or the coming night but that relate to God, to his absence that is so present, like the breasts of the young girl, so young before the immensity of what is to come. — Marguerite Duras

[But] we inherit a whole system of desires which do not necessarily contribute God's will but which, after centuries of usurped autonomy steadfastly ignore it. If the thing we like doing is, in fact, the thing God wants us to do, yet that is not our reason for doing it; it remains a mere happy coincidence. We cannot therefore know that we are acting at all, or primarily, for God's sake, unless the material of the action is contrary to our inclination or (in other words) painful and what we cannot know that we are choosing, we cannot choose. The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination. How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like... — C.S. Lewis

We should not seek to confirm God's will by the absence of adversity. — Alistair Begg

We pick up our shots and for the first time there's a total absence of sound in the room. From the ceiling, shy silver things blink and wait. Dennis doesn't sit, but hovers at the edge of the table, leaning in with a darkroom perfected slump. His hair hangs like its edges were dipped in lead. Thin spears pointing to the table. I'm looking at his face; we're both serious in a self-aware way, pretending not to notice.

"It doesn't even feel like I left. God, you look fucking terrible. But it's a terrible face that drinks tequila well. Down. And cheers."

We force a dull clash of cups and pour everything down at once. The hard tequila shudders that never happen in the movies. First your head feels light, then it starts receiving the distress signals from throat, lungs, belly. Your shoulders jerk to shake off the snake that wrapped around you and squeezed. It burns. The good burn. — Laurie Perez

The full acting out of the self's surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination — C.S. Lewis

If pain sometimes shatters the creature's false self sufficiency, yet in supreme Trial or Sacrifice' it teaches him the self-sufficiency which really ought to be his - the 'strength which, if Heaven gave it may be called his own': for then, in the absence of all merely natural motives and supports he acts in that strength, and that alone, which God confers upon him through his subjected will. Human will becomes truly creative and truly our own when it is wholly God's, and this is one of the many senses in which he that loses his soul shall find it. In all other acts our will is fed through nature, that is, through created things other than the self - through the desires which our physical organism and our heredity supply to us. When we act from ourselves alone, that is, from God in ourselves - we are collaborators in, or live instruments of creation: and that is why such an act undoes with 'backward mutters of deserving power' the uncreative spell which Adam laid upon his species. — C.S. Lewis

To re-establish man at the heart of his destiny is, they claim, to repudiate all ethics. However, far from God's absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements. He bears the responsibility for a world which is not the work of a strange power, but of himself, where his defeats are inscribed, & his victories as well. — Simone De Beauvoir

So tell me: were you born broken just like me, born hungry? Are we all of us born with some part of us missing? Are we each us born with a hole?....Born with a hole and no earthly way of finding just the exact right plug to fill it, not 'til you've tried 'em from A to Z and back once more: booze, fags, work, candy, men, girls, heroin, methedrine, methadone, God. Tried having a baby. Tried killing yourself. A hundred religions, from Calvin to the Dalai Lama and back again; tried every damn thing you could think of and some you had to stumble over....You stick a plug in your weakness like a finger in the proverbial dike and let pressure build up let it swell and swell 'til there's nothing left but tension, nothing left but what's left over--the absence, not the presence. The wound you shape your soul around. — Gemma Files

Peace is not just about the absence of conflict; it's also about the presence of justice. Martin Luther King Jr. even distinguished between "the devil's peace" and God's true peace. A counterfeit peace exists when people are pacified or distracted or so beat up and tired of fighting that all seems calm. But true peace does not exist until there is justice, restoration, forgiveness. Peacemaking doesn't mean passivity. It is the act of interrupting injustice without mirroring injustice, the act of disarming evil without destroying the evildoer, the act of finding a third way that is neither fight nor flight but the careful, arduous pursuit of reconciliation and justice. It is about a revolution of love that is big enough to set both the oppressed and the oppressors free. — Shane Claiborne

In the Garden story, good and evil are found on the same tree, not in separate orchards. Good and evil give meaning and definition to each other. If God, like us, is susceptible to immense pain, He is, like us, the greater in His capacity for happiness. The presence of such pain serves the larger purpose of God's master plan, which is to maximize the capacity for joy, or in other words, "to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." He can no more foster those ends in the absence of suffering and evil than one could find the traction to run or the breath to sing in the vacuum of space. God does not instigate pain or suffering, but He can weave it into His purposes. "God's power rests not on totalizing omnipotence, but on His ability to alchemize suffering, tragedy, and loss into wisdom, understanding, and joy. — Terryl L. Givens

To me, its seems necessary to rediscover - and the energy to do so exists - that even the political and economic spheres need moral responsibility, a responsibility that is born in man's heart and, in the end, has to do with the presence or absence of God. — Pope Benedict XVI

With the notion of a theistic god and a vernacular notion of "proof" in hand, we can disprove a god's existence in this way: If a thing is claimed to exist, and its existence has consequences, then the absence of those consequences is evidence against the existence of the thing. In other words, the absence of evidence - if evidence should be there - is indeed evidence of absence. — Jerry A. Coyne

The absence of God's answer is a clear answer; it speaks of the need to get closer to God — Sunday Adelaja

God's true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars. [...]

I learned God's true language is only silence and breath. — Kazim Ali

The silence, all at once, penetrated; he felt his arms grow vague. In the absence of the Batys and Pris he found himself fading out, becoming strangely like the inert television set which he had just unplugged. You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. I mean, before they came here I could stand it, being alone in the building. But now it's changed. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople. In panic he thought, I'm dependent on them. Thank god they stayed. — Philip K. Dick

Let the systematic theologian spell it out. Let the artists throw out thoughts and slants, maybe even slants no one else has thought of. They should give another view of something familiar to help us learn more about it. They should deal with love, life, good, evil, God, the world and faith. Many of the biblical writers were poets more than they were theologians. Poets and prophets ranted and raved, and storytellers wrote great yarns that all had different slants on God and life and faith. Perhaps the poet's absence from the Church for many centuries has left it deprived of much insight. — Steve Stockman

The believer caught between the flesh and Spirit is also caught between death and life. That is what happens when God intervenes in a human life. That intervention does not necessarily bring tranquility. In fact, it is more likely to bring tension and conflict. It is the life surrendered to the flesh which lacks inner conflict, for the decline through sin to death can be so easy. It is when the Spirit enters a life to contest the sway of sin and counter the weakness of the flesh that conflict ensues. The presence of moral conflict is a sign of the Spirit presence, not the Spirit's absence. — James D.G. Dunn

It is the absence of the knowledge of God and man's refusal to obey Him that lie at the root of every problem which besets us. — Billy Graham

God, Who is everywhere, never leaves us. Yet He seems sometimes to be present, sometimes to be absent. If we do not know Him well, we do not realize that He may be more present to us when He is absent than when He is present. — Thomas Merton

It occurs to me that my thinking has been faulty: we do not feel God's absence. We feel the absence of all that is lost to God, that which has set itself apart and refuses to return, believing itself to be in exile. — K.J. Bishop

Whenever we feel the absence of peace - whenever our unmet longing for joy expresses itself as anxiety, or depression, or fear, or anger, or enslavement to any number of defeating sin patterns or addictions - the emptiness we're feeling and trying to fill is for what our relationship with God, by His loving choice, was always meant to be. Our angst comes from the underlying implications of Ecclesiastes 3:11, where the Scripture says God has put eternity into man's heart. — Matt Chandler

While theoretically a person may block God out, logically there will be a breakdown because ultimately all enunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind. And if that moral doctrine is not absolute then the definer himself becomes undefined. That's what we are living with - an undefined definer giving us definitions for our course, and we are being trapped in the quicksand of the absence of objective truth. — Ravi Zacharias

The mistakes of my youth have allowed me to see what true love is through the experience of its absence. They have allowed me to see that love is not a feeling but an action. It is the laying down of one's life for the beloved. It is not the laying down of someone else's life or body for our own gratification. Ultimately, as a Christian, I have come to see that love is not merely an action but a commandment. We are commanded to love the Lord our God and to love our neighbor - and our enemy. Clearly true love has nothing to do with selfishness in any — Joseph Pearce

Even if the absence of evidence for a given god were not evidence of its absence, it would still be evidence that the belief in that god is unreasonable. That's the only proposition that any atheist of any kind has to demonstrate in order to win the argument. Because anything beyond that ... is just having fun. — Scott Clifton

And then God gave me insight: this was winter. It would end, in time, but not by my own doing. My responsibility was simply to know the season, and match my actions and inactions to it. It was to learn the slow hard discipline of waiting. It was my season to believe in spite of - to believe in the absence of evidence or emotion, when there's nothing, no bud, no color, no light, no birdsong, to validate belief. It was my time to walk without sight. — Mark Buchanan

The silence of God's voice will make you wonder if He is even there. And the absence of God's presence will make you wonder if He even cares. He is. And He does. — Charles R. Swindoll

Affiiction makes God appear to be absent for a time, more absent than a dead man, more absent than light in the utter darkness of a cell. A kind of horror submerges the whole soul. During this absence there is nothing to love. What is terrible is that if, in this darkness where there is nothing to love, the soul ceases to love, God's absence becomes final. — Simone Weil

Toxic thoughts leave no room for truth to flourish. And in the absence of truth, lies reign. Spend some time soaking in your favorite verses from Scripture tonight. The more we read God's truths and let truth fill our minds, the less time we'll spend contemplating untruths and toxic thoughts. — Lysa TerKeurst

Many Christians are either woefully deficient in their knowledge of Scripture or noticeably devoid of any experience of God's power. The Lord never intended this for His people. We have all seen firsthand the joyless intellectual arrogance the absence of spiritual power can produce, as well as the fanatical emotional excess that comes from the lack of theological integrity. — Sam Storms

*And to keep her immune system strong she followed Dr. Goodhue's advice to abstain from alcohol, get plenty of fresh air and exercise, and consume a nourishing diet, low in salt. Page 144
"Fear is good. In the right degree it prevents us from making fools of ourselves. But in the wrong measure it prevents us from fully living. Fear is our boon companion but never our master.". Page 204
"I've come to believe that how we choose to live with pain, or injustice, or death ... Is the true measure of the Divine within us." ... "I used to wonder, why did God give children leprosy? Now I believe: God doesn't give anyone leprosy. He gives us, if we choose to use it, the spirit to live with leprosy, and with the imminence of death. Because it is in our own mortality that we are most Divine.". Page 307
**"With wonder and a growing absence of fear she realized, I am more than I was an hour ago.". Page 372
**my favorite! — Alan Brennert

For a moment I think to myself, which connection is quicker to God? Telepathically or by email? Maybe there's a quicker turnaround time if I email my problems. I should probably start by apologizing and doing something spiritual to make up for my long absence. Would an Angel with poor customer service etiquette respond to my email? Is there an 800 holy number to dial? If so, which manual would the Angel be reading from? The Bible or the Qur'an? Does it matter? Would the Angel have Sister Mary sitting next to her, watching and coaching her on how to talk to people with issues? And how do you handle four billion calls a day? I suppose I would have to wait my turn in line, just like everyone else. — Sadiqua Hamdan

That's what I like about God. You get to know Him by His occasional absence. — Colum McCann

What we view as God's absence or lack of quickness to change our circumstances or fix our problems is really God waiting for the proper time to act on our behalf, while simultaneously waiting for us to acknowledge our need for rescue. — Tracie Miles

Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is not like faith, or love that exist just as does light and heat. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light. — Albert Einstein

Faith doesn't mean an absence of fear. It means facing fear and trusting that God's goodness is greater. — Matt Chandler

Each of these imperatives has a tendency to degenerate into an excuse for greed and materialism in the absence of the other. Without the call to generosity, the call to productivity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives - as long as they accumulate their wealth by working productively. But without the call to productivity, the call to generosity makes people feel entitled to live materialistic lives - as long as they pay off God by tithing their 10 percent. The only way to root out materialism is to reorient people's attitudes about their entire economic lives. If you only lead people to do good work (productivity), they'll use their wealth selfishly. If you only lead them to get their use of wealth right (generosity), they won't orient their lives to good work. The whole life of a person has to turn away from selfishness and serve God and neighbor. As someone once said, the only effective place to intervene in a vicious circle is everywhere at once. — Greg Forster

What I affirm is the intuition that where God's presence is no longer a tenable supposition and where His absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. And I would vary Yeats's axiom so as to say: no man can read fully, can answer answeringly to the aesthetic, whose "nerve and blood" are at peace in sceptical rationality, are now at home in immanence and verification. We must read as if. — George Steiner

Then you think there is no God?"
"No, I think there quite probably is one."
"Then why? ... "
Mustapha Mond checked him. "But he manifests himself in different ways to different men. In premodern times he manifested himself as the being that's described in these books. Now ... "
"How does he manifest himself now?" asked the Savage.
"Well, he manifests himself as an absence; as though he weren't there at all. — Aldous Huxley

{God's] presence is not contingent upon our feeling it. It simply is. We must learn to remember this and calm ourselves. By His apparent 'absence', He is leading us to a more mature level of consciousness, self-offering, and love. He is leading us from the love of God for the sake of His gifts to love of God for His own sake. — Monks Of New Skete

Where God's presence is no longer a tenable proposition and where his absence is no longer a felt, indeed overwhelming weight, certain dimensions of thought and creativity are no longer attainable. — Rudolf Steiner

The crucial question, therefore, is not how to accomplish the final reconciliation. That messianic problem ought not to be taken out of God's hands. The only thing worse than the failure of some modern grand narratives of emancipation would have been their success! Merely by trying to accomplish the messianic task, the have already done too much of the work of the antichrist. In demasking anti-messianic projects that offer universal salvation, Lyotard helps us ask the right kind of question, which is not how to achieve the final reconciliation, but what resources we need to live in peace in the absence of the final reconciliation. — Miroslav Volf

God found Gideon in a hole.
He found Joseph in a prison.
He found Daniel in a lion's den.
He has a curious habit of showing up in the midst of trouble, not the absence. Where the world sees failure, God sees future.
Next time you feel unqualified to be used by God remember this, he tends to recruit from the pit, not the pedestal. — Jon Acuff

The absence of the understanding of God's time is the reason why our lives are unstable. — Sunday Adelaja

I'm not antidoctor. I think there is way too much pressure on doctors these days to be God-like saviors, and as a result there is much arrogance in the medical community. Doctors always have the attitude of "Look, we are scientists - we've figured out the human body. Trust us." Yet whenever I go for a checkup, they are always like, "It's either a freckle, or we have to amputate your head. That will be five thousand dollars." I think most people's apprehension about home birth is the absence of the doctor. I mean, could you imagine if there was no doctor at Jesus's birth? That could have changed the course of history. — Jim Gaffigan

Invoking the letters of God's Name without presence of mind is invocation of the tongue; invoking with presence of mind is invocation of the heart; and invoking with an absence of self-awareness because of absorption in the Invoked is the invocation of the Self - this is the hidden invocation! — Ibn Ata Allah