Quotes & Sayings About Uniting

The power of monsters is their ability to fuse opposites, to merge contraries, to subvert rules, to overthrow cognitive barriers, moral distinction, and ontological categories. Monsters overcome the barrier of time itself. Uniting past and present, demonic and divine, guilt and conscience, predator and prey, parent and child, self and alien, our monsters are our innermost selves. — David D. Gilmore

The connectivity declaration is about uniting the whole industry - a lot of companies that typically compete very fiercely - to push in a coherent direction. — Mark Zuckerberg

Feel the love of God; then in every person you will see the face of the Father, the light of love which is in all. You will find a magic, living relationship uniting the trees, the sky, the stars, all people, and all living things; and you will feel a oneness with them. This is the code of divine love. — Paramahansa Yogananda

Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all! By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall. — John Dickinson

What you're hoping for about the concert is an overall collective experience that everyone has and that you share with them and when you hit the stage you have a "common" feeling. Even though you're the performer and they're the audience there's something uniting everybody in the room. — Joel Plaskett

I think when it comes to females in the media you'll see something that kind of upsets me which is that females are pinned up against each other more so than men. You know, for example like you never see online "vote for who has the better butt - this actor or this actor." It's always like this female singer and this female singer. And you get to vote. I mean, it's daily I see these things and these polls like "let us know who's sexier, who's the hotter momma" and I just don't see it like "who's the hotter dad" you know? I think that one thing that I do believe as a feminist is that in order for us to have gender equality we have to stop making it a girl fight and we have to stop being so interested in seeing girls trying to tear each other down, it has to be more about cheering each other on as women. That's just kind of how I feel about it. — Taylor Swift

Each one of us is called to be an artisan of peace, by uniting and not dividing, by extinguishing hatred and not holding on to it, by opening paths to dialogue and not by constructing new walls! — Pope Francis

Graphic design is a visual language uniting harmony and balance, color and light, scale and tension, form and content. But it is also an idiomatic language, a language of cues and puns and symbols and allusions, of cultural references and perceptual inferences that challenge both the intellect and the eye. — Jessica Helfand

I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human. — Richard Wright

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

It is also good to love: because love is difficult. For one human being to love another human being: that is perhaps the most difficult task that has been entrusted to us, the ultimate task, the final test and proof, the work for which all other work is merely preparation ... Loving does not at first mean merging, surrendering, and uniting with another person (for what would a union be of two people who are unclarified, unfinished, and still incoherent?), it is a high inducement for the individual to ripen, to become something in himself, to become world, to become world in himself for the sake of another person; it is a great, demanding claim on him, something that chooses him and calls him to vast distances ... Merging and surrendering and every kind of communion is not for them (who must still, for a long, long time, save and gather themselves); it is the ultimate, is perhaps that for which human lives are as yet barely large enough. — Rainer Maria Rilke

The woman movement is one which is uniting by co-operating influences, all the antagonisms that are warring on the family state. Spiritualism, free love, free divorce, the vicious indulgences consequent on unregulated civilization, the worldliness which tempts men and women to avoid large families, often by sinful methods, thus making the ignorant masses the chief supply of the future ruling majorities; and most powerful of all, the feeble constitution and poor health of women, causing them to dread maternity as
what it is fast becoming
an accumulation of mental and bodily tortures. — Catharine Beecher

True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Love at first has nothing to do with unfolding, abandon and uniting with another person (for what would be the sense in a union of what is unrefined and unfinished, still second order?); for the individual it is a grand opportunity to mature, to become something in himself, to become a world, to become a world in himself for another's sake; it is a great immoderate demand made upon the self, something that singles him out and summons him to vast designs. — Rainer Maria Rilke

[T]hat state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings
the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horor from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite [ ... ] in the hope that if we apply all the metaphors of normality, that if we heap them high enough, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state metaphorically. — Amitav Ghosh

With winsomeness and clarity this great tenet in witness to which we are gladly uniting.
-Roger R. Nicole — R.C. Sproul

Insults, Mocking and ridicule and not constructive criticism have no place in a peaceful resolution. These things are far from putting down the bow, uniting humanity, and lifting the veil of ignorance. If we are to be faithful to the truth we must tear down the curtain to the Holy of Holies in our own ideological temples and admit our errors in logic. — Leviak B. Kelly

What the spiritual journey is all about is uniting our will with God's will, wanting what He wants, loving what He loves, living a life that in all its aspects honors Him and gives Him glory. — Ralph Martin

Love is the one uniting, relatable thing in everyone's life. It's what we all want and struggle with and fight for. — Drew Barrymore

Consultation and compliance can conduce little to the perfection of any literary performance; for whoever is so doubtful of his own abilities as to encourage the remarks of others, will find himself every day embarrassed with new difficulties, and will harass his mind, in vain, with the hopeless labour of uniting heterogeneous ideas, digesting independent hints, and collecting into one point the several rays of borrowed light, emitted often with contrary directions. — Samuel Johnson

Magic is a faculty of wonderful virtue, full of most high mysteries, containing the most profound contemplation of most secret things, together with the nature, power, quality, substance and virtues thereof, as also the knowledge of whole Nature, and it doth instruct us concerning the differing and agreement of things amongst themselves, whence it produceth its wonderful effects, by uniting the virtues of things through the application of them one to the other. — Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

So black people all across this country are uniting. They must unite, and they must organize themselves. — H. Rap Brown

The word "yoga" literally means "uniting", because when you're doing it you are uniting your mind and your body. You can tell this almost immediately because your mind will be thinking, "Ouch, that hurts," and your body will say, "I know." And your mind will think, "You have to get out of this position." And your body will say, "I agree with you, but I can't right now. I think I'm stuck. — Ellen DeGeneres

A man protesting against error is on the way towards uniting himself with all men that believe in truth. — Thomas Carlyle

The strongest bond of human sympathy outside the family relation should be one uniting working people of all nations and tongues and kindreds. — Abraham Lincoln

Bashir paused to watch a live CNN feed ... Bashir was struck silent by the images of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building.
As he studied the screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last shaking his head ruefully, "I'm a moderate Msulim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of the desk. "Your president Bush had done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years. — Greg Mortenson

Let us award a just, a brilliant homage to those rare men whom nature has endowed with the precious privilege of arranging a thousand isolated facts, of making seductive theories spring from them; but let us not forget to state, that the scythe of the reaper had cut the stalks before one had thought of uniting them into sheaves! — Francois Arago

... there are simply no words that would be worthy of describing their encounter. And if any narrator ever tries to come up with some details, it would be only to arouse the readers' lust, and would not do justice to what happened that night between Nini and the young woman whose dream he invaded. It was just a glorious experience of two bodies melting in one, two souls uniting in one, two hearts beating with the same beat, and two spirits becoming one. Yes, it was a dream. — Stevan V. Nikolic

The Union was formed by the voluntary agreement of the States; and these, in uniting together, have not forfeited their Nationality, nor have they been reduced to the condition of one and the same people. If one of the States chose to withdraw its name from the contract, it would be difficult to disprove its right of doing so ... — Alexis De Tocqueville

One of the greatest films ever made by a director who, almost forty years after his death, is still an intimidating and disturbing figure in the history of cinema. Visconti's films stand outside the borders of the medium, by their ambition, by their scope, uniting past and present, individuals and history, both deeply human and transcendent. The Leopard, his most translucent, towering achievement, embodies everything the best filmmaking can be, grand, profound, entertaining, physical and metaphysical, sharp as a blade and melodramatic. It stays with you, forever. — Olivier Assayas

In uniting yourself to God's will, you take on new life and gather great courage, willingly embracing the cross and kissing His hand even when it chastises you, a hand that reaches out to you in love and has no other intention but your greater spiritual well-being. — Paul Of The Cross

I sang 'American Pie' a lot in my stage set. It had a knack of uniting an audience in a sing-along. It's a clever song about American history but wrapped in a fantastic tune. — Johnny Vegas

SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. — Thomas Paine

If we look around, then, at the crucial problem areas of our society - the areas of crisis and failure - we find in each and every case a "red thread" marking and uniting them all: the thread of government. In every one of these cases, government either has totally run or heavily influenced the activity. — Murray Rothbard

Conservatism is, among many other things, a culture. The most important glue binding it together is a shared sense of cultural grievance - the conviction, uniting conservatives high and low, theocratic and plutocratic, neocon and paleocon, that someone, somewhere is looking down their noses at them with a condescending sneer. — Rick Perlstein

Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy. — George Eliot

Art is the uniting of the subjective with the objective,
of nature with reason, of the unconscious with the conscious, and
therefore art is the highest means of knowledge. — Leo Tolstoy

'Mad Men' is the greatest example of a perfect cast uniting with a perfect group of writers and creators to create a show that is bold, brutal, and brilliant. — Rachel G. Fox

The uniting of Orthodoxy with state absolutism came about on the soil of a non-belief in the Divineness of the earth, in the earthly future of mankind; Orthodoxy gave away the earth into the hands of the state because of its own non-belief in man and mankind, because of its nihilistic attitude towards the world. Orthodoxy does not believe in the religious ordering of human life upon the earth, and it compensates for its own hopeless pessimism by a call for the forceful ordering of it by state authority. — Nikolai Berdyaev

We should lay aside every hindrance and endeavour by uniting the whole force and spirit of our people to raise again a great British nation standing up before all the world; for such a nation, rising in its ancient vigour, can even at this hour save civilization. — Winston Churchill

The fruit of the Spirit is the natural produce of his gracious inward influence, the spontaneous and inevitable result of his uniting us to Jesus Christ. — Philip Graham Ryken

WE ARE STRUGGLING FOR A UNITING WORD BUT THE GOOD NEWS IS THAT WE HAVE A UNITING MOVEMENT. — Emma Watson

The Great Work is the uniting of opposites. It may mean the uniting of
the soul with God, of the microcosm with the macrocosm, of the female
with the male, of the ego with the non-ego - or what not. — Aleister Crowley

If you think about 'Person of Interest' with Taraji P. Henson or 'Scandal' with Kerry Washington - any of those black women could have been any race; they just happen to be black. And those are the characters that I'm more attracted to. It's not so much about separation of race, but really, more uniting us. — Sufe Bradshaw

People have fought in vain about the names and lives of their saviors, and have named their religions after the name of their savior, instead of uniting with each other in the truth that is taught. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

The spontaneous expansion of the Church reduced to its elements is a very simple thing ... What is necessary is faith. What is needed is the kind of faith which uniting a man to Christ, sets him on fire. — Roland Allen

Do you love her?" I ask hoarsely.
His head whirls toward me. "No."
"You sure about that?"
"I don't. Not the way you do."
I relax, just slightly. "Still. You care about her."
Of course he does. We all do, because that girl flew into our house like a whirlwind and made everything come alive again. She brought steel and fire. She made us laugh again. She gave us a purpose - at first, it was us uniting against her. Then it turned into us standing beside her. Protecting her. Loving her. — Erin Watt

I told him that the soul could be freed from sinful thoughts only by guarding the mind and cleansing the heart and that this could be done by interior prayer. I added that according to the holy Fathers, one who performs saving works simply from the fear of hell follows the way of bondage, and one who does the same just in order to be rewarded with the Kingdom of Heaven follows the path of a bargainer with God. The one they call a slave, the other a hireling. But God wants us to come to him as children to their father. He wants us to behave ourselves honorably from love for him and zeal for his service. He wants us to find our happiness in uniting ourselves with him in a saving union of mind and heart. — Reginald M. French

The good news for single people and for couples is that Jesus is the One who ultimately fulfills our need for intimacy. He is the One who draws us out of our isolation and loneliness by uniting us to himself and to those who belong to him. We bear fruit to the degree that we are united to him. — Ann Spangler

Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher. — Thomas Paine

Some of the pain released, and love filled the cleared space, uniting, magnetizing more self-love to it. — Colleen Chen

Traditionally, sex has been a very private, secretive activity. Herein perhaps lies its powerful force for uniting people in a strong bond. As we make sex less secretive, we may rob it of its power to hold men and women together. — Thomas Szasz

Such growth will move humans into ever-higher energy states, ultimately transforming our bodies into spiritual form and uniting this dimension of existence with the afterlife dimension, ending the cycle of birth and death. — James Redfield

Records were vitally important to the development of music and of all music cultures. With that being pushed by the wayside, I can't see an iPod uniting us. In fact it separates us, the streets are full of people bumping into lamp posts, listening to their own little universe, and there's no sharing in that. — John Lydon

I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. — Gloria E. Anzaldua

It is time that capital and labor realized that their interests are really comutual, as interdependent as the brain and the body; time they ceased their fratricidal strife and, uniting their mighty forces under the flag of Progress, completed the conquest of the world and doomed Poverty, Ignorance and Vice ... Unless labor is employed, capital cannot increase - it cannot concentrate. Unless property rights are held inviolable and capital thereby encouraged to high enterprise, labor is left without a lever with which to lift itself to perfect life and must sink back to barbarism. — William Cowper Brann

The wave uniting with its depth is yoga. — Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

We are all united by both pain and love. Both a smile and a wound. We are all united by these very basic yet very influential things, because we all recognize them, we all know what they feel like to have or to give. Everything else, all the other things that do not unite us - those things are all illusions. — C. JoyBell C.

[Uniting workers should not] lead to a war upon property, or the owners of property. — Abraham Lincoln

The life's work of Walt Disney and Ray Kroc had come full-circle, uniting in perfect synergy. McDonald's began to sell its hamburgers and french fries at Disney's theme parks. The ethos of McDonaldland and of Disneyland, never far apart, have finally become one. Now you can buy a Happy Meal at the Happiest Place on Earth. — Eric Schlosser

In modern European thought a tragedy is occurring in that the original bonds uniting the affirmative attitude towards the world with ethics are, by a slow but irresistible process, loosening and finally parting. Out of my life and Thought. — Albert Schweitzer

Marriage is more than joining the bonds of two people. It's the uniting of two souls already attuned to each other. — Sophie Monroe

Freedom is more than just a willingness to live; it is a force that binds us all. Being truly free is seeing America as our "heart and home." Uniting around a common good will help bring us together in true happiness into the future. — Phil Mitchell

The greatest misery does not stop Me from uniting Myself to a soul, but where there is pride, I am not there. — Mary Faustina Kowalska

Music can act as an invisible uniting force that claims the unclaimed and defines the outcasts of a culture. — Bob Boilen

A transcription doesn't so much repeat words as contextualize and historicize them, uniting them with the time, place, and source of their utterance. A transcript reproduces the words it records; it does not use them. Quoting is an attitude and practice, central to aesthetic and literary experiences as different from each other as the sublime and camp. — William Flesch

He considered his disposition as of the sort which must suffer heavily, uniting very strong feelings with quiet,serious, and retiring manners, and a decided taste for reading and sedentary pursuits. — Jane Austen

It is not without significance that Hebrew was the language used by Abraham, and that he could not hand it on to all his descendants but only to those who were derived from him through Jacob, and by uniting to form the people of God in the most evident and conspicuous fashion, were able to keep the covenants and to preserve the stock from which Christ came. And — Augustine Of Hippo

If the universal is the essential, then it is the basis of all life and art. Recognizing and uniting with the universal therefore gives us the greatest aesthetic satisfaction, the greatest emotion of beauty. — Piet Mondrian

Long, long ago, before I was a tormented artist, afflicted with longing yet incapable of forming durable attachments, long before this, I was a glorious ruler uniting all of a divided country - so I was told by the fortune-teller who examined my palm. Great things, she said, are ahead of you, or perhaps behind you; it is difficult to be sure. And yet, she added, what is the difference? Right now you are a child holding hands with a fortune-teller. All the rest is hypothesis and dream. — Louise Gluck

It has been observed that a dwarf standing on the shoulders of a giant will see farther than the giant himself; and the moderns, standing as they do on the vantage ground of former discoveries and uniting all the fruits of the experience of their forefathers, with their own actual observation, may be admitted to enjoy a more enlarged and comprehensive view of things than the ancients themselves. — Charles Caleb Colton

Know thyself as the pride of His creation, the link uniting divinity and matter; behold a part of God Himself within thee; remember thine own dignity nor dare descend to evil or meanness. — Akhenaton

The Greeks put us to shame not only by their simplicity, which is foreign to our age; they are at the same time our rivals, nay, frequently our models, in those very points of superiority from which we seek comfort when regretting the unnatural character of our manners. We see that remarkable people uniting at once fullness of form and fullness of substance, both philosophising and creating, both tender and energetic, uniting a youthful fancy to the virility of reason in a glorious humanity. — Friedrich Schiller

I believe that the Hindu faith has developed the spiritual in its devotees at the expense of the material, and I think that in the Western world the contrary is true. By uniting the materialism of the West with the spiritualism of the East I believe much can be accomplished. It may be that in the attempt the Hindu faith will lose much of its individuality. — Swami Vivekananda

Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth. — Samuel Johnson

Fighting for freedom" is a myth. There's only freedom in uniting. You're not really free with an, "Us vs Them" mentality; because you are constantly defending yourself. And in fighting, there's no time for freedom. — Jason Daniel Chaplin

How is love between two people a sin? Love isn't about gender; it's about two souls uniting. — Alex Sanchez

Happy the bard, (if that fair name belong
To him that blends no fable with his song)
Whose lines uniting, by an honest art,
The faithful monitors and poets part,
Seek to delight, that they may mend mankind,
And while they captivate, inform the mind.
Still happier, if he till a thankful soil,
And fruit reward his honorable toil:
But happier far who comfort those that wait
To hear plain truth at Judah's hallow'd gate — William Cowper

It is particularly recommended, as a means of uniting the inhabitants of the village into one family, that while each faithfully adheres to the principles which he most approves, at the same time all shall think charitably of their neighbours respecting their religious opinions, and not presumptuously suppose that theirs alone are right. — Robert Owen

Our culture, language, history, and values are vital to uniting us as a nation. — Bobby Jindal

Why didst Thou reject that last gift? Had Thou accepted that last offer of the mighty spirit, Thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth
that is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap, because the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a universal state. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts. — E. O. Wilson

In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes of the most abstract branch of mathematical science. — Ada Lovelace

What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, or uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully. — Victor Cherbuliez

The grandeur of a profession is ... above all, uniting men: there is only one true luxury, that of human relationships. — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

Since men cannot create new forces, but merely combine and control those which already exist, the only way in which they can preserve themselves is by uniting their separate powers in a combination strong enough to overcome any resistance, uniting them so that their powers are directed by a single motive and act in concert. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

BMG has been an awesome partner throughout my career, and with New London, we plan to continue bridging the gap between soul, pop, London, and New York - uniting them through music. — Estelle

In Him we live (exist). In Him we breathe (take in life). In Him we have our being (our identity). The more we live in Him - not just going to church, but uniting with God in all aspects of life - the more we start to accept and look for the reality of His presence in the everyday. We see it in us. We see it in the way we interact with others. It is part of the way we think, and it guides the choices we make. — Suzanne Eller

Citizens across the United States are now uniting in a great cause to establish a Department of Peace, seeking nothing less than the transformation of our society, to make non-violence an organizing principle, to make war archaic through creating a paradigm shift in our culture for human development, for economic and political justice and for violence control. — Dennis Kucinich

The classic metaphor for the necessity of uniting calm abiding and superior insight is a candle flame. When this flame is bright and there is no wind, it is
clearly visible and will also illuminate its surroundings. However, if the flame is bright but flickers in the wind, it will neither be seen distinctly itself nor clearly light up anything else. Likewise, if our mind is endowed with both the superior insight that sees true reality and the quality of calm abiding, through which we can one-pointedly direct this insight wherever we please, this mind will see both its own nature and the nature of all phenomena. — Karl Brunnholzl

No wonder that tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate "spiritual logic of late capitalism" uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material benefits, divine experience and unlimited shopping. It propagates the permanent transgression of all rules, the violation of all taboos, instant gratification as the path to enlightenment; it overcomes old-fashioned "binary" thought, the dualism of mind and body, in claiming that the body at its most material (the site of sex and lust) is the royal path to spiritual awakening. Bliss comes from "saying yes" to all bodily needs, not from denying them: spiritual perfection comes from the insight that we already are divine and perfect, not that we have to achieve this through effort and discipline. The body is not something to be cultivated or crafted into an expression of spiritual truths, rather it is immediately the "temple for expressing divinity. — Slavoj Zizek

The acts of the mind, wherein it exerts its power over simple ideas, are chiefly these three: 1. Combining several simple ideas into one compound one, and thus all complex ideas are made. 2. The second is bringing two ideas, whether simple or complex, together, and setting them by one another so as to take a view of them at once, without uniting them into one, by which it gets all its ideas of relations. 3. The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made. — John Locke

The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. — Alfred North Whitehead

The perfect marriage is a uniting of three persons - a man and a woman and God. That is what makes marriage holy. — Billy Graham

Because uniting with you
is being one with the cosmos
Being in love with God — Vishwas Chavan

You have to try to build support around causes. It is uniting to campaign on a single issue, and it is never just a single issue; it's always more than that. — Tony Benn

The United States and Israel have enjoyed a friendship built on mutual respect and commitment to democratic principles. Our continuing search for peace in the Middle East begins with a recognition that the ties uniting our two countries can never be broken. — George W. Bush

Reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies. — Samuel P. Huntington

Sometimes the soul is questioning whether it [has] any patience, any faith, till God comes and puts him into an afflicted estate, where he must exercise this faith or perish. Then it [the soul] appears like one that thinks he cannot swim, yet being thrown into the river, then uniting all his strength, he makes a shift to swim to land, and sees what he can do. How [often] have we heard Christians say, 'I thought I could never have endured such a pain, trusted God in such a straight! But now God [has] taught me what he can do for me, what he wrought in me. — William Gurnall