"...not to praise or to condemn, but first of all to understand."
Tsanoff
"Because He that is praised is in truth only one, all religions are finally one."
Jalaludin of Persia
"...a resolute pursuit of truth irrespective of dogmatic authority, but also a more positive and sympathetic attitude towards religious experience."
Tsanoff
"Let every good and true Christian understand that truth, wherever he finds it, belongs to his Lord."
St. Augustine
"Amo ut intelligam"
I love, that I may understand.
"To lose thyself in some sort, as if thou wert not, and to have no consciousness of thyself at all -- to be emptied of thyself and almost annihilated -- such is heavenly conversation... So to be affected is to become God."
Bernard of Clairvaux
"...a feeling of absolute dependence, ...a sense and taste of the Infinite."
Friedrich Schleiermacher
"The best that each one has and knows
He names it God, his God: bestows
Upon him, heaven and earth above,
His fear and where he can, his love."
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
"Trust ye not in lying words."
Plato
"The acoustical description of a discourse need not rule out its likely significance."
Tsanoff
"This conviction that spiritual values are real and abiding is the heart of religious faith."
Tsanoff
"...religion was invented by the first rogue who met a fool."
Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)
"The South African Zulus speak of
Unkulunkulu, the Old-Old One, begetter of all that there is."
Tsanoff
"Rational theology does not produce religious faith; it clarifies and interprets it; it is faith in God seeking to understand and justify itself."
Tsanoff
"If all things are such that it is possible for them not to be, there must have been a time when nothing existed. But if this were the case, even now nothing would exist; for what is not, only begins through what is. Therefore not all beings are merely possible, and there is something which is necessary."
St. Thomas Aquinas
"Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above and the moral law within.""
Immanuel Kant
"The movement and death direction imply the goal; they define it sufficiently for our purpose; and in direct experience we are never at a loss to know what is higher and what is lower."
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison
"The thoughtful believer has been disturbed in his confidence but he has not been confuted."
Tsanoff
"Belief in God is philosophical, belief in a God is absurd."
Sir Frederick Pollock
"Our own position and point of view is bound to determine or to color our estimate of a reported experience of conversion, but it should not confuse our psychological analysis of it."
Tsanoff
"Among man's various ways of seeking communion with his object of worship, prayer is the most universal. So inevitable appears this appeal of the soul to God that it has often been regarded as the fundamental religious experience."
Tsanoff
"Laborare et orare."
To work and to pray.
"Here man seeks God's intimate presence, to be in God and God in him. In this dual sense is man in prayer an instrument in God's hand."
Tsanoff
"The experience of prayer may so possess the soul that it is no longer sought as a help in great need but absorbs thought and feeling for its own sake."
Tsanoff
"Lord, I neither have, nor love, nor desire anything but Thee."
St. Francis of Assisi
"It is by being considered fairly that its deficiencies are exposed."
Tsanoff
"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in Thee."
St. Augustine
"The principle that God is One, source and summit of the religion of Allah, absorbs the Sufi's mind so completely that he undertakes to withdraw from all else in order to be one with the One."
Tsanoff
"Plotinus saw all existence and all human nature as God's emanation. And man's high destiny, his truth and his blessedness, was to rise from sense and sensuality, through reason and virtuous conduct, to mystical intuition and ecstasy, man's union with God."
Tsanoff
"In the midst of finite groping and confusion, the mystical experience is a 'sense and taste of the Infinite.'"
Tsanoff
"Yet each saint in his own way is in God's intimate presence, for all Paradise breathes the bliss of the Divine."
Tsanoff, of Dante
"Christian theism would conceive of the saint's union with God as communion, but not absorption of personality."
Tsanoff, of Dante
"There is nothing terrible in living to a man who rightly comprehends that there is nothing terrible in ceasing to live."
Diogenes Laertius
"Our minds are incapable of final certainty; in religion as in science we are wedded to probabilities. It is important, therefore, to trace the drift of evidence in order to judge towards what reasonable conclusion our thoughts may incline."
Tsanoff
"To live or to die is not our concern but follows the divine order of nature."
Here, the phrase "not our concern" means 'This is something beyond our control,' rather than 'We don't care about this.'
Tsanoff
"Selfhood is the only kind of system we know which combines living change with abiding identity and consciousness of its own unity: a unique harmony aware of itself."
Tsanoff
"When the will abandons the higher, and turns to what is lower, it becomes evil -- not because that is evil to which it turns, but because the turning itself is perverse."
St. Augustine
"I will grant you that life is mean, but how did we ever discover its meanness?"
Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The self is not something discrete and substantial that can be 'asserted' or 'denied'. It is an active and continually developing system of purposes and values: purposes and values pursued or achieved, partly sustaining and partly contending with each other."
Tsanoff
"Moral downfall does not mean our relapse into selfishness, but a lowering of the values with which we become identified."
Tsanoff
"Good and evil are ever opposed to each other, but theirs is an opposition-in-relation."
Tsanoff
"In the gradational world of values, then, good and evil are not in the thing or state or position, but in the direction manifested."
Tsanoff
"They reckon ill who leave Me out."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
