God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.
Woman is God’s supreme creation. Only after the earth had been formed, after the day had been separated from the night, after the waters had been divided from the land, after vegetation and animal life had been created, and after man had been placed on the earth, was woman created; and only then was the work pronounced complete and good.
For when you looked into my mother's eyes you knew, as if He had told you, why God sent her into the world - it was to open then minds of all who looked to beautiful thoughts. And that is the beginning and end of literature.
Epitaphs are cheap, and they do a poor chap a world of good after he is dead, especially if he had hard luck while he was alive. I wish they were used more.
A prevalent fallacy is the assumption that a proof of an afterlife would also be a proof of the existence of a deity. This is far from being the case. If, as I hold, there is no good reason to believe that a god either created or presides over this world, there is equally no good reason to believe that a god created or presides over the next world, on the unlikely supposition that such a thing exists.
Fidel Castro looked after the poor, he looked after the weak, he looked after the widow, he looked after the orphan - he did all the things that Prophet Muhammad did from the spiritual perspective.
God made the world, My Lord, and looked at it, and saw that it was good. Yes. But what if the world had looked back at him, to see whether he was good or not?
If I had eyes in the back of my head, I would have told you you looked good as I walked away.
And when the world is created, it is created in such a way that those eternal objects of God's loving wisdom become actualities - interacting with one another, relating to God in the finite realm.
And after the flood we are told that the curse that had been pronounced upon Cain was continued through Ham's wife, as he had married a wife of that seed. And why did it pass through the flood? because it was necessary that the devil should have a representation upon the earth as well as God
If it was really true that predation is God's will, it would have to follow for Christians that the life of Jesus -- what after all is the self-disclosure of God -- manifested and vindicated this predator/prey relationship. Such a gospel would be substantially different from the one we currently have.... Instead of raising Lazarus from the dead, the Predator Jesus could only comment that death is God's blessing. Instead of preaching the good news of the coming kingdom of God, the proclamation would run: "Eat and be eaten.
His mother had told him that when you looked into the eyes of God at the pearly gates, all the questions you ever had were answered. Ronan had a lot of questions. Waking Glendower might be like that. Fewer angels attending, and maybe a heavier Welsh accent. Slightly less judgment.
I was shocked when I found out who the biggest failure in the Bible actually is...The biggest one in the whole Bible is God...I mean, He lost His top-ranking, most anointed angel; the first man He ever created; the first woman He ever created; the whole earth and all the fullness therein; a third of the angels, at least - that's a big loss, man....Now, the reason you don't think of God as a failure is He never said He's a failure. And you're not a failure till you say you're one.
There's tons of creative people in television that have one failure after another, and they just step up higher. I could never get over that. When I had a failure, there was no such thing as just getting over it.
[St. Francis] looked upon creation with the eyes of one who could recognize in it the marvelous work of the hand of God. His solicitous care, not only towards men, but also towards animals is a faithful echo of the love with which God in the beginning pronounced his 'fiat' which brought them into existence. We too are called to a similar attitude.
Over and over again, I looked family members who had lost loved ones to police violence, I looked them right in the eye and told them, 'Don't worry. We will get justice for your family.'
I grew up pretty poor - not poor compared with people in India or Africa who are really poor, but poor enough so that the worry about money really cast a pall over your life a lot of the time.