#divinity

Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives. ↗

— Bernard of Clairvaux

#christianity #conversion #divine #divinity #fear

Within biblical theology it remains the case that the one living God created a world that is other than himself, not contained within himself. Creation was from the beginning an act of love, of affirming goodness of the other. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good; but it was not itself divine. At its height, which according to Genesis 1 is the creation of humans, it was designed to REFLECT God, both to reflect God back to God in worship and to reflect God into the rest of creation in stewardship. But this image-bearing capacity of humankind is not in itself the same thing as divinity. Collapsing this distinction means taking a large step toward a pantheism within which there is no way of understanding, let alone addressing, the problem of evil. ↗

— N.T. Wright

#divinity #evil #god #humanity #pantheism

From the simple stringing together of lemon garlands for the goddess Durga, to dividing the prasadam or blessed foods for the children first, I came to associate food not only with feminity, but also with purity and divinity. ↗

— Padma Lakshmi

#associate #blessed #came #children #dividing

Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity. ↗

— Novalis

#indispensable #links #mediator #more #nothing

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. ↗

— Joyce Carol Oates

#accidental #divinity #entire #entire universe #except

Once the Republicans get rolling, they assume they're going to win everything. They are zealots, and zealots assume the last five percent of whatever their plan is will be taken care of by their own greatness or momentum or divinity. ↗

— Keith Olbermann

#care #divinity #everything #five #get

Every individual who makes us suffer can be attached by us to a divinity of which he or she is a mere fragmentary reflexion, the lowest step in the ascent that leads to it, a divinity or an Idea which, if we turn to contemplate it, immediately gives us joy instead of the pain which we were feeling before — indeed the whole art of living is to make use of the individuals through whom we suffer as a step enabling us to draw nearer to the divine form which they reflect and thus joyously to people our lives with divinities. ↗

— Marcel Proust

#suffering #art

... the most important concept ever put forth was that matter, ALL matter, with no exceptions from stone to star to starfish to student to sovereign, is as divine as all else in the cosmos, for all flows from Consciousness, the Word that came before the World - and all, in time, will flow back. ↗

— Ki Longfellow

#divine-consciousness #divinity #life #philosophy #life

You express your own divinity by being alive and by loving yourself and others. ↗

— Miguel Ruiz

#love #freedom

Great masters neither want nor need your worship. Your greatest gift to them and yourself is to emulate their divinity by claiming it as your own. ↗

— Alan Cohen

#divinity #emulate #gift #great #greatest