#eli

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and give thanks for things. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#christ #christian-religion #christianity #god-father #god-son

What a lovely thing a rose is!" He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#flowers #goodness #hope #nature #providence

I barely noticed loneliness anymore; it was my normal condition, by necessity if not by nature. ↗

— Rachel Hartman

#nature

I'll walk where my own nature would be leading. It vexes me to choose another guide. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#self-reliance #nature

It is cruel, you know, that music should be so beautiful. It has the beauty of loneliness of pain: of strength and freedom. The beauty of disappointment and never-satisfied love. The cruel beauty of nature and everlasting beauty of monotony. ↗

— Benjamin Britten

#beautiful #beauty #cruel #disappointment #everlasting

I never really understood the word ‘loneliness’. As far as I was concerned, I was in an orgy with the sky and the ocean, and with nature. ↗

— Björk

#bjork #loneliness #nature #orgy #nature

I know whom we must fight...it is the Church. For all its history, it's tried to suppress and control every natural impulse.That is what the Church does, and every church is the same: control, destroy, obliterate every good feeling. ↗

— Philip Pullman

#nature

The man who fears to be alone will never be anything but lonely, no matter how much he may surround himself with people. But the man who learns, in solitude and recollection, to be at peace with his own loneliness, and to prefer its reality to the illusion of merely natural companionship, comes to know the invisible companionship of God. Such a one is alone with God in all places, and he alone truly enjoys the companionship of other men, because he loves them in God in Whom their presence is not tiresome, and because of Whom his own love for them can never know satiety. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#god #loneliness #meditation #solitude #love

Just because a feeling is natural does not mean it should be indulged. ↗

— Roseanna White

#temptation #urge #nature

Vaguely conscious of that great suspense in which we live, we find our escape from its sterile, annihilating reality in many dreams, in religion, passion, art. ↗

— Arthur Symons

#dreams #escape #religion #suspense #throbbing-gristle