#ali

God is so vastly wonderful, so utterly and completely delightful that He can, without anything other than Himself, meet and overflow the deepest demands of our total nature, mysterious and deep as that nature is. ↗

— A.W. Tozer

#spirituality #nature

It would seem that unless we see through and beyond the physical, we shall not even see the physical as we ought to see it: as the very vehicle for the glory of God ↗

— Elisabeth Elliot

#nature #spirituality #nature

Though many non-Native Americans have learned very little about us, over time we have had to learn everything about them. We watch their films, read their literature, worship in their churches, and attend their schools. Every third-grade student in the United States is presented with the concept of Europeans discovering America as a "New World" with fertile soil, abundant gifts of nature, and glorious mountains and rivers. Only the most enlightened teachers will explain that this world certainly wasn't new to the millions of indigenous people who already lived here when Columbus arrived. ↗

— Wilma Mankiller

#native-american #race #nature

If human beings were to treat one another's personal property the way they treat the natural environment, we would view that behavior as anti-social and illegal. ↗

— Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew

#nature

The foundation of individual rights is the assumption that people have wants and needs and are authorities on what those wants and needs are. If people's stated desires were just some kind of erasable inscription or reprogrammable brainwashing, any atrocity could be justified. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#justice #politics #rights #nature

We risk losing what nature is if we couch its value in human terms. ↗

— Richard Black

#nature #nature

My foregrounds are imaginary, my backgrounds real. ↗

— Gustave Flaubert

#realism #writing #nature

The sacred tree, the sacred stone are not adored as stone or tree they are worshipped precisely because they are hierophanies, because they show something that is no longer stone or tree but sacred, the ganz andere or 'wholly other. ↗

— Mircea Eliade

#organic #sacred #spirituality #nature

The indispensability of reason does not imply that individual people are always rational or are unswayed by passion and illusion. It only means that people are capable of reason, and that a community of people who choose to perfect this faculty and to exercise it openly and fairly can collectively reason their way to sounder conclusions in the long run. As Lincoln observed, you can fool all of the people some of the time, and you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time. ↗

— Steven Pinker

#reason #nature

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#inequality #politics #nature