June 22, 2014 – Quotations Treasury – a sub-blog of Soul Needs

ON WONDER
“… just as man is endowed with the ability to know certain aspects of reality, he is endowed with the ability to know that there is more than what he knows.”

“Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. It is the result of what man does with his higher incomprehension.”

ON THE INEFFABLE
“… how would we know of the mystery of being if not through our sense of the ineffable?”

“We do not create the ineffable, we encounter it…”

“The ineffable is conceivable in spite of its being unknowable.”

ON FAITH
“We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light.”

“We do not have faith in deeds, we attain faith through deeds – Deeds, not just thoughts or intentions.”

“Faith is the beginning of the end of egocentricity.”

ON GOD
“God is the center toward which all forces tend.”

“… whatever I do to man, I do to God. When I hurt a human being, I injure God.”

ON MAN
“Some of us may find it difficult to believe that God created the world, yet most of us find it even more difficult to act as if man had not created the world.”

ON BEING HUMAN
“… to be human consists of a number of qualities or sensibilities. One of the central sensibilities is a sense of mystery of my own existence. Without it, I cease to be human. I may be a human being, but I’m not being human.”

ON RELIGION
“… Man has often made a god out of a dogma, a graven image which he worshipped … He would rather believe in the dogma than in God … he may be ready to take other people’s lives, if they refuse to share his tenets …”

“We must choose between interfaith or internihilism … no religion is an island …”

“…creed is, like music, a translation of the unutterable into a form of expression. The original is known to God alone.”

ON PRAYER
“Unless God is at least as real as my own self, unless I am sure that God has at least as much life as I do, how could I pray?… If God is unable to listen to me, then I am insane in talking to Him.”

“Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods …”

ON RACISM
“God is either the father of all men or of no man. And the idea of judging a person in terms of black or brown or white is an eye disease.”

“Racism is worse than idolatry. Racism is Satanism, unmitigated evil …”

ON BEING JEWISH
“We are the most challenged people under the sun. Our existence is either superfluous or indispensable to the world; it is either tragic or holy to be a Jew …”

ON CHRISTIANITY
“The vital challenge for the Church is to decide whether Christianity came to overcome, to abolish, or to continue the Jewish way by bringing the God of Abraham and His will to the Gentiles.”

ON THE TASK
“The task is to humanize the sacred and to sanctify the secular.”

ON THE PROBLEM OF EVIL
“The cardinal issue, why does the God of justice and compassion permit evil to persist? is bound up with the problem of how man should aid God so that His justice and compassion prevail.”

“Our greatest threat is not the atomic bomb. Our greatest threat is the callousness to the suffering of man.”

Praying with my legs A J Heschel – http://www.prayingwithmylegs.com/words/index.htm

Entering The Body To Go Beyond It

Ask yourself, “Am I aware not only of what is happening at this moment, but also of the Now itself as the living timeless inner space in which everything happens?”

Although this question seems to have nothing to do with the inner body, you may be surprised that by becoming aware of the space of Now, you suddenly feel more alive inside.

You are feeling the aliveness of the inner body — the aliveness that is an intrinsic part of the joy of Being.

We have to enter the body to go beyond it and find out that we are not that.

~ From: A New Earth, by Eckhart Tolle http://www.eckharttolle.com/