#lit

Scholars of the East and West have heroically consecrated their whole working lives to making available, by means of their own disciplines, Sufi literary and philosophical material to the world at large. In many cases they have faithfully recorded the Sufis' own reiteration that the Way of the Sufis cannot be understood by means of the intellect or by ordinary book learning. ↗

— Idries Shah

#love #reality #sufis #sufism #truth

He asked me if I ever prayed-- and I lied. Then he asked me if I ever got an answer, or a sign that my prayer was heard-- and I told him the truth. "Yeah... me neither." His hands sounded like leather as he slowly rubbed some warmth into his knotted knuckles. "So what happens to all of those lost prayers?" I didn't know if I should tell him the truth of what I really believed... or not. I put my hand on his slumping shoulder, smiled and told him the truth of what I believe, "Don't worry... ↗

— Spuds Crawford

#prayer #reality #religion #faith

More people than ever before look to government as their best chance of securing well-being rather than as their inevitable enemy. Politics as a contest to capture state power has at times apparently replaced religion (sometimes even appearing to eclipse market economics) as the focus of faith that can move mountains. ↗

— John Morris Roberts

#faith

Women have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamed or contained within it. ↗

— Adrienne Rich

#marriage #norms #faith

Panentheistic doctrine contains all of deism and pandeism except their arbitrary negations. ↗

— Charles Hartshorne

#deism #faith #god #logic #pandeism

If God were to remove all evil from our world (but somehow leave human beings on the planet), it would mean that the essence of 'humanness' would be destroyed. We would become robots. Let me explain what I mean by this. If God eliminated evil by programming us to perform only good acts, we would lose this distinguishing mark - the ability to make choices. We would no longer be free moral agents. We would be reduced to the status of robots. Let's take this a step further. Robots do not love. God created us with the capacity to love. Love is based upon one's right to choose to love. We cannot force others to love us. We can make them serve us or obey us. But true love is founded upon one's freedom to choose to respond. ↗

— Billy Graham

#freedom #god #good #love #moral-freedom

Since the beginning of time, spirituality and religion have been called to fill in the gaps that science did not understand. ↗

— Dan Brown

#dan-brown #faith #religion #science #spirituality

And, while Jessica had faith enough in Providence, she preferred to seek help from more accessible sources. Her assistant was Phelps, the coachman. ↗

— Loretta Chase

#practicality #providence #faith

I really want to believe that when our Quiet Waters kids wake up in the middle of the night, scared, they’ll remember being in their bunks with John and Kate and Whit and me right there protecting them,” he said. “I hope we gave them that sense of belonging because I know there’ll be times in their lives when grasping at those bonds could mean the difference between making it and not. ↗

— Laura Anderson Kurk

#anxiety #children #dating #faith #fear

I always fantasized about having a girl stand on my bar like in that movie Coyote Ugly, but I never thought it would happen. ↗

— Faith Sullivan

#new-adult-contemporary-romance #new-adult-fiction #new-adult-lit #new-adult-romance #faith