#messiah

If I told you what it takes to reach the highest high you'd laugh and say nothing that simple, but you've been told many times before messiah's point you to the door though no one's got the guts to leave the temple. ↗

— Pete Townshend

#before #door #got #guts #high

Science reckons many prophets, but there is not even a promise of a Messiah. ↗

— Thomas Huxley

#many #messiah #promise #prophets #science

I was not a messiah, but an ordinary man who had become a leader because of extraordinary circumstances. ↗

— Nelson Mandela

#become #circumstances #extraordinary #extraordinary circumstances #had

We need no messiah and no sterile conception of a god menacing us with hell and purgatory. ↗

— Frederica Montseny

#god #hell #menacing #messiah #need

The first choral music I remember hearing was Handel's 'Messiah' when the Mormon Tabernacle Choir broadcast it over the radio. ↗

— Dave Brubeck

#choir #first #hearing #i #i remember

Life will be wonderful when men no longer fear dying. When the last superstitions are thrown out and we meet death with the same equanimity as life. No longer will children's minds be twisted by evil gods whose fantastic origin is in those barbaric tribes who feared death and lightning, who feared life. That's it: life is the villain to to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge. ↗

— Gore Vidal

#gore-vidal #life #messiah #death

One notorious apikoros named Hiwa al-Balkhi, writing in ninth-century Persia, offered two hundred awkward questions to the faithful. He drew upon himself the usual thunderous curses—'may his name be forgotten, may his bones be worn to nothing'—along with detailed refutations and denunciations by Abraham ibn Ezra and others. These exciting anathemas, of course, ensured that his worrying 'questions' would remain current for as long as the Orthodox commentaries would be read. In this way, rather as when Maimonides says that the Messiah will come but that 'he may tarry,' Jewishness contrives irony at its own expense. If there is one characteristic of Jews that I admire, it is that irony is seldom if ever wasted on them. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #curses #heretics #hiwi-al-balkhi #irony

Not only were the Jews expecting the birth of a Great King, a Wise Man and a Saviour, but Plato and Socrates also spoke of the Logos and of the Universal Wise Man 'yet to come'. Confucius spoke of 'the Saint'; the Sibyls, of a 'Universal King'; the Greek dramatist, of a saviour and redeemer to unloose man from the 'primal eldest curse'. All these were on the Gentile side of the expectation. What separates Christ from all men is that first He was expected; even the Gentiles had a longing for a deliverer, or redeemer. This fact alone distinguishes Him from all other religious leaders. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#jesus-christ #prophecy #the-messiah #men

Our Christian conviction is that Christ is also the messiah of Israel. Certainly it is in the hands of God how and when the unification of Jews and Christians into the people of God will take place. ↗

— Pope Benedict XVI

#certainly #christ #christian #christians #conviction

John the Baptist was supposed to point the way to the Christ. He was just the voice, not the Messiah. So everybody's calling has dignity to it and God seems to know better than we do what is in us that needs to be called forth. ↗

— James Green Somerville

#better #called #calling #christ #dignity