Worldly Quotes - Page 3

• ...we must first scrutinize thoroughly anything appearing in our hearts or any saying suggested to us. Has it come purified from the divine and heavenly fire of the Holy Spirit? Or does it lean toward Jewish superstition? Is its surface piety something which has come down from bloated worldly philosophy? We must examine this most carefully, doing as the apostle bids us: 'Do not believe in every spirit, but make sure to find out if spirits are from God'.

  John Cassian

  Christian, Philosophy, Believe

  "Conferences".

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• When a vision begins to form everything changes, including the air around me. I seem no longer to be in the same atmosphere. I feel a peacefulness and a love that are indescribable. I stand alone, and nothing worldly can touch me. I feel that I am looking down from a higher plane and wondering why others cannot see what I am seeing.

  Jeane Dixon

  Air, Atmosphere, Vision

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• My own experience is that the Bible is dull when I am dull. When I am really alive, and set in upon the text with a tidal pressure of living affinities, it opens, it multiplies discoveries, and reveals depths even faster than I can note them. The worldly spirit shuts the Bible; the Spirit of God makes it a fire, flaming out all meanings and glorious truths.

  Horace Bushnell

  Bible, Fire, Discovery

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• Novel writing is a kind of private pleasure, even if nothing comes of it in worldly terms.

  Barbara Pym

  Writing, Kind, Pleasure

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• Do not lower the standard or cater to the worldly laxness of the average Christian by making the way in easy. Make sure that everyone who joins fully understands his duties and obligations and is willing, in Christ's strength, to undertake them.

  Isabella Macdonald Alden

  Christian, Average, Way

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• O what a blessing is Sunday, interposed between the waves of worldly business like the divine path of the Israelites through the sea.

  Samuel Wilberforce

  Sunday, Blessing, Sea

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• One of the greatest challenges for all of us is to learn how to live in the world without participating in all that it offers. Worldly standards will always be in a state of flux. The only true and unchanging standards are those set by the Savior and His teachings of the restored gospel.

  Donald L. Staheli

  Teaching, Challenges, World

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• To a worldly man, a God-intoxicated person will appear mad and he will laugh at him, But to the God-intoxicated man, the worldly appear insane, foolish, misled, blind.

  Sathya Sai Baba

  Lying, Men, Mad

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• A seeming ignorance is very often a most necessary part of worldly knowledge. It is, for instance, commonly advisable to seem ignorant of what people offer to tell you; and when they say, Have not you heard of such a thing? to answer No, and to let them go on, though you know it already.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Ignorance, Knowledge, People

  "Manners and speech or maxims extracted from Lord Chesterfield's letters to his son". Book by Lord Chesterfield, 1884.

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• It is the long term investor who will in practice come in for the most criticism. For it is the essence of his behaviour that he should be eccentric, unconventional and rash in the eyes of the average opinion. If he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness; and if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches that it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally.

  John Maynard Keynes

  Running, Independent, Eye

  1936 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money.

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• Only yesterday I was full of worldly fancies, although religion had already some share in my thoughts: glory was still my daydream. Today my hopes are higher, and I covet here below nothing but obscurity and peace.

  Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

  Yesterday, Obscurity, Fancy

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• As the love of the heavens makes us heavenly, the love of virtue virtuous, so doth the love of the world make one become worldly.

  Philip Sidney

  Heaven, World, Virtue

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• How is it that there are not many who are led by sermons to forsake open sin? Do you know what I think? That is because preachers have too much worldly wisdom.

  Teresa of Avila

  Thinking, Too Much, Sin

  Saint Teresa (of Avila) (1946). “General introduction. Life. Spiritual relations”

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• Prayers are designed to raise God-consciousness five times a day, throughout one's life. Prayers also provide regular exercise - like yoga or Tai Chi or Qigong built into the day - and serve as a calming retreat from the daily demands of life. Muslims thus learn to balance deeni wa dunyavi (the spiritual and the worldly). They can't abandon one for the other; that's the essence of their faith.

  Haroon Siddiqui

  Spiritual, Prayer, Yoga

  Haroon Siddiqui (2010). “Groundwork Being Muslim”, p.59, A&C Black

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• We desperately need seers who can see through the mist- Christian leaders with prophetic vision.  Unless they come soon it will be too late for this generation.  And if they do come we will no doubt crucify a few of them in the name of our worldly orthodoxy.

  Aiden Wilson Tozer

  Christian, Names, Leader

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• What an artist does, is fail. Any reading of the literature, (I mean the literature of artistic creation), however summary, will persuade you instantly that the paradigmatic artistic experience is that of failure. The actualization fails to meet, equal, the intuition. There is something "out there" which cannot be brought "here". This is standard. I don't mean bad artists, I mean good artists. There is no such thing as a "successful artist" (except, of course, in worldly terms).

  Donald Barthelme

  Art, Reading, Mean

  "The Sandman". "Sadness". Book by Donald Barthelme, 1972.

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• The dunyâ distracts and preoccupies the heart and body, but al-zuhd (asceticism, not giving importance to worldly things) gives rest to the heart and body. Verily, Allâh will ask us about the halâl things we enjoyed, so what about the harâm!

  Hasan of Basra

  Heart, Giving, Als

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• When Christians forget about hope and tenderness they become a cold Church, that loses its sense of direction and is held back by ideologies and worldly attitudes, whereas God’s simplicity tells you: go forward, I am a Father who caresses you.

  Pope Francis

  Christian, Attitude, Father

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• By day, or on a cloudless night, a pilot may drink the wine of the gods, but it has an earthly taste; he's a god of the earth, like one of the Grecian deities who lives on worldly mountains and descended for intercourse with men. But at night, over a stratus layer, all sense of the planet may disappear. You know that down below, beneath that heavenly blanket is the earth, factual and hard. But it's an intellectual knowledge; it's a knowledge tucked away in the mind; not a feeling that penetrates the body.

  Charles Lindbergh

  Wine, Night, Men

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• In the history of a soul’s evolution there is a critical point of the human incarnation that decides for us whether we stay there, go down or progress upwards. There is a knot of worldly desires impeding us; cut the knot by mastering desires and go forward. This done, progress is assured.

  Virchand Gandhi

  Cutting, Soul, Progress

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• A poet’s freedom lies precisely in the impossibility of worldly success. It is the freedom of one who knows he will never be anything but a failure in the world’s estimation, and may do as he pleases. The poet is a man on the sidelines of life, sidelined for life. He belongs to the aristocracy of the outcast, the lowest of the low, below the salt of the earth. A member of the most ancient regime in the world. One that cannot, it seems, be overthrown.

  Walter Martin

  Lying, Men, World

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• Climbing is a heroic liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value, be it in the value of worldly power or of spirituality. To rise in an elevator, balloon, or airplane is to experience being liberated from weight, sublimated, invested with superhuman abilities. In addition, to rise from the earth is to approach the realm of light and overview. Therefore the negative overcoming of weight is at the same time the positive achievement of enlightenment and an unobstructed outlook.

  Rudolf Arnheim

  Airplane, Light, Climbing

  Rudolf Arnheim (2009). “The Dynamics of Architectural Form”, p.33, Univ of California Press

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• Archery, fencing, spear fighting, all of the martial arts, tea ceremony, flower arranging...in all of these, correct breathing, correct balance, and correct stillness help to remake the individual. The basic aim is always the same: by tirelessly practicing a given skill, the student finally sheds the ego with its fears, worldly ambitions, and reliance on objective scrutiny - sheds it so completely that he becomes the instrument of a deeper power, from which mastery falls instinctively, without further effort on his part, like a ripe fruit.

  Karlfried Graf Durckheim

  Art, Flower, Fall

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• Every day that we allow ourselves to take things for granted, every day that we allow some little physical infirmity or worldly worry to come between us and our obstinate, indignant, defiant exultation, we are weakening our genius for life.

  John Cowper Powys

  Worry, Genius, Littles

  "The Meaning of Culture". Book by John Cowper Powys, p. 134, 1929.

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• One desire has been the ruling passion of my life. One high motive has acted like a spur upon my mind and soul. and sooner than that I should seek escape from the sacred necessity that is laid upon me, let the breath of life fail me. It is this: That in spite of all worldly opposition, God's holy ordinances shall be established again in the home, in the school and in the State for the good of the people; to carve as it were into the conscience of the nation the ordinances of the Lord, to which Bible and Creation bear witness, until the nation pays homage again to God

  Abraham Kuyper

  Passion, Home, School

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