#divinity

I have always looked upon alchemy in natural philosophy to be like enthusiasm in divinity, and to have troubled the world much to the same purpose. ↗

— William Temple

#always #divinity #enthusiasm #i #like

The correct description is that we try every day to become more humble when we talk about divinity, we try to realize how little we know and how open minded we should be. ↗

— John Templeton

#become #correct #day #description #divinity

Mine is just a simple old human story - of one person trying, with great rigor and discipline, to comprehend her personal relationship with divinity. ↗

— Elizabeth Gilbert

#discipline #divinity #great #her #human

Wit is the appearance, the external flash of imagination. Thus its divinity, and the witty character of mysticism. ↗

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#character #divinity #external #flash #imagination

[T]he concern of man is not his future but his present, not the world but his soul. We must be just, we must strive, we must engage ourselves with the business of the world for our own sake, because through that, and through contemplation in equal measure, our soul is purified and brought closer to the divine. ... Thought and deed conjoined are crucial. ... The attempt must be made; the outcome is irrelevant. Right action is a pale material reflection of the divine, but reflection it is, nonetheless. Define your goal and exert reason to accomplish it by virtuous action; successs or failure is secondary. ↗

— Iain Pears

#deeds #divinity #failure #future #goals

[Man] is ... a living plume of fire, raying out upon the world the Divine Love which fills his heart. ↗

— Jiddu Krisnamurti

#god #religion #love

For, thought Ahab, while even the highest earthly felicities ever have a certain unsignifying pettiness lurking in them, but, at bottom, all heartwoes, a mystic significance, and, in some men, an archangelic grandeur; so do their diligent tracings-out not blue the obvious deduction. To trail the genealogies of these high mortal miseries, carries us at last among the sourceless primogenitures of the gods; so that, in the face of all the glad, hay-making suns, and the softcymballing, round the harvest-moons, we must needs give in to this: that the gods themselves are not for ever glad. The ineffaceable, sad birth-mark in the brow of man, is but the stamp of sorrow in the signers. ↗

— Herman Melville

#divinity #philosophical #sadness #unhappiness #men

When you enter a grove peopled with ancient trees, higher than the ordinary, and shutting out the sky with their thickly inter-twined branches, do not the stately shadows of the wood, the stillness of the place, and the awful gloom of this doomed cavern then strike you with the presence of a deity? ↗

— Luci Anneu Sèneca

#inspiration #nature #trees #inspirational

Humanism and Divinity are as complementary to one another in theorder of culture, as are Nature and Grace in the order of being. ↗

— Christopher Dawson

#being #complementary #culture #divinity #grace

If a faithful account was rendered of Man’s ideas upon Divinity, he would be obliged to acknowledge, that for the most part the word “gods” has been used to express the concealed, remote, unknown causes of the effects he witnessed; that he applies this term when the spring of the natural, the source of known causes, ceases to be visible: as soon as he loses the thread of these causes, or as soon as his mind can no longer follow the chain, he solves the difficulty, terminates his research, by ascribing it to his gods  …   When, therefore, he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon  …   does he, in fact, do any thing more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe? ↗

— Paul Henri Thiry d'Holbach

#divinity #gods #ignorance #knowledge #materialism