A Quote by Eric Hoffer
To the excessively fearful the chief characteristic of power is its arbitrariness. Man had to gain enormously in confidence before he could conceive an all-powerful God who obeys his own laws.
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The absence of effective State, and, especially, national, restraint upon unfair money-getting has tended to create a small class of enormously wealthy and economically powerful men, whose chief object is to hold and increase their power. The prime need is to change the conditions which enable these men to accumulate power which is not for the general welfare that they should hold or exercise. We grudge no man a fortune which represents his own power and sagacity, when exercised with entire regard to the welfare of his fellows.
No man is much good unless he believes in God and obeys His laws.
A man after God's own heart is...
a man who yearns to please God,
a man who desires to grow spiritually,
a man who had a heart that obeys.
The power paradox is that we gain power by advancing the welfare of other people and yet when we feel powerful, it turns us into impulsive sociopaths and we lose those very skills. If you're in the military, you gain power by forging strong ties in your comrades. And then the irony is that once we feel powerful and we are taken with our own success, we ignore the skills that got us power in the first place.
Whilst a man is persuaded that he has it in his power to contribute anything, be it ever so little, to his salvation, he remains in carnal self-confidence; he is not a self-despairer, and therefore is not duly humbled before God, he believes he may lend a helping hand in his salvation, but on the contrary, whoever is truly convinced that the whole work depends singly on the will of God, such a person renounces his own will and strength; he waits and prays for the operation of God, nor waits and prays in vain
Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.
We must each walk through life on our own, but we don't have to do it alone. God wants a powerful people. He gives His power to those who are faithful. We have a sacred obligation to seek after the power of God and then to use that power as He directs. And when we have the power of God with us, nothing is impossible.
By His gracious condescension God became man and is called man for the sake of man and by exchanging His condition for ours revealed the power that elevates man to God through his love for God and brings God down to man because of His love for man. By this blessed inversion, man is made God by divinization and God is made man by hominization. For the Word of God and God wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His embodiment.
The only idea man can affix to the name of God, is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And, incomprehensibly difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it, from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it. It is difficult beyond description to conceive that space can have no end; but it is more difficult to conceive an end. It is difficult beyond the power of man to conceive an eternal duration of what we call time; but it is more impossible to conceive a time when there shall be no time.
The [chief] characteristic of Hitler's leadership [was] his over-estimation of the power of the will. [To win the war] this will had only to be translated into faith down to the youngest private soldier.
I can readily conceive of a man without hands or feet; and I could conceive of him without a head, if experience had not taught me that by this he thinks, Thought then, is the essence of man, and without this we cannot conceive of him.
Laws, in their most general signification, are the necessary relations arising from the nature of things. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws.
Sooner or later, man has always had to decide whether he worships his own power or the power of God.
Before modern man can gain control over the forces that now threaten his very existence, he must resume possession of himself. This sets the chief mission for the city of the future: that of creating a visible regional and civic structure, designed to make man at home with his deeper self and his larger world, attached to images of human nature and love.
Your thought describes laws, courts, judges, punishments. Mine explains that when man makes a law, he either violates it or obeys it. If there is a basic law, we are all one before it. He who disdains the mean is himself mean. He who vaunts his scorn of the sinful vaunts his disdain of all humanity.
Man can only conceive God within the limitation of his own mind.
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