Laurence Sterne Quotes

While there are corporal descriptions of what the afterlife is like in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, what's going on there is the finite trying to describe the infinite. If God knows everything, started everything and is the only one who knows how it's going to end, how can any human know what God wants?

Americans have perfected the art of reducing complicated truths into formulas and products. We're desperate for instant, visible, measurable ways of knowing God, instead of trusting that it's complicated and a mystery.

In viewing the scheme of redemption, I seem like one viewing a vast and complicated machine of exquisite contrivance; what I comprehend of it is wonderful, what I do not, is, perhaps, more so still.

God is not an encyclopedia whose task is to satisfy our curiosity.

Reason refuseth its homage to a God who can be fully understood.

Abraham Lincoln suggested never presume to know what God's will is, and I would never presume to know God's will or to speak God's words.

O God, for as much as without Thee We are not enabled to doubt Thee, Help us all by Thy grace To convince the whole race It knows nothing whatever about Thee.

In a sense, we are better prepared to praise God than the angels are, for angels have never known the joy of redemption.

Our faith can only go as far as our awareness of Gods goodness

The book which the reader now holds in his hands, from one end to the other, as a whole and in its details, whatever gaps, exceptions, or weaknesses it may contain, treats of the advance from evil to good, from injustice to justice, from falsity to truth, from darkness to daylight, from blind appetite to conscience, from decay to life, from bestiality to duty, from Hell to Heaven, from limbo to God. Matter itself is the starting-point, and the point of arrival is the soul. Hydra at the beginning, an angel at the end.

Sickness sometimes is a great blessing. People become angels through sickness.

The sense of repentance is better assurance of pardon than the testimony of an angel.

Mama and I would go to a funeral and she'd stand up to read the dead person's eulogy. She made the ignorant and ugly sound like scholars and movie stars, turned the mean and evil into saints and angels. She knew what people had meant to be in their hearts, not what the world had forced them to become. She knew the ways in which working too hard for paltry wages could turn you mean and cold, could kill the thing that made you laugh.

Despite our sins, we can say with Peter: Lord, you know everything, you know that I love you.

It takes four angels to oversee an apocalypse: a recorder to make the book that would be scripture in the new world; a preserver to comfort and save those selected to be the first generation; an accuser to remind them why they suffer; and a destroyer to revoke the promise of survival and redemption, and to teach them the awful truth about furious sheltering grace.

Not being able to understand God is frustrating, but it is ridiculous for us to think we have the right to limit God to something we are capable to comprehending.

You're beautiful in battle. ... Like an avenging angel come to deliver the justice of heaven." "Funny. That is kind of why I'm here." "Angels fall, Rose.

I heard an Angel singing; When the day was springing, Mercy, Pity, Peace; Is the world's release.

The devil could change. He was once an angel and may be evolving still.

Mystery such as is given of God is beyond the power of human penetration, yet not in opposition to it.

If you understood him, it would not be God.

It was love that motivated His self-emptying, that led Him to become a little lower than angels, to be subject to parents, to bow His head beneath the Baptist's hands, to endure the weakness of the flesh, and to submit to death even upon the cross

If God was small enough for you to completely understand him, he wouldn't be big enough for you to completely trust him.

How unutterably sweet is the knowledge that our Heavenly Father knows us completely. No talebearer can inform on us; no enemy can make an accusation stick; no forgotten skeleton can come tumbling out of some hidden closet to abash us and expose out past; no unsuspected weakness in our characters can come to light to turn God away from us, since He knew us utterly before we knew him and called us to Himself in the full knowledge of everything that was against us.

The Master was exceedingly gracious to university dons who visited him, but he would never reply to their questions or be drawn into their theological speculations. To his disciples, who marveled at this, he said, "Can one talk about the ocean to a frog in a well or about the divine to people who are restricted by their concepts?