Johann Kaspar Lavater Quotes

I try to make my life about service, and hope that one day we can all 'see' a little better because God is with everyone and everywhere.

My greatest desire is that I may perceive the God whom I find everywhere in the external world, in like manner also within and inside myself.

To know God, know your heart (conscience). After you know your heart, you will learn to see God in all things. Truth can only be seen by those with Truth in them.

Faith is like a bright ray of sun light. It enables us to see God in all things as well as all things in God.

We do not see God, but everywhere we see something divine; first and most typically in the center of a reasonable man, in the depth of a living human product. You can directly feel and think nature, the universe, but not the Godhead. Only the man among men can poetize and think divinely and live with religion.

Pride looks down, and no one can see God but by looking up.

To look away from the world, or to stare at it, does not help a man to reach God; but he who sees the world in Him stands in His presence.

I'm human, you're human, let me greet your humanness. Let's be people together for a while.

It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.

Every day I see Jesus Christ in all his distressing disguises.

A book or poem which has no pity in it had better not be written.

To see everything in God and to see God in everything normally takes a lifetime of practice.

I consider Les Nourritures Terrestres as a frightening book: "Look for God in no other place than everywhere." Go and tell that to a workman, an engineer!

The highest condition of the religious sentiment is when. . . the worshiper not only sees God everywhere, but sees nothing which is not full of God.

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

If each man or woman could understand that every other human life is as full of sorrows, or joys, or base temptations, of heartaches and of remorse as his own . . . how much kinder, how much gentler he would be.

He didn't know of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said, and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight, and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

The Christian religion is, above all the religions that ever prevailed or existed in ancient or modern times, the religion of wisdom, virtue, equity and humanity.

God is everywhere or nowhere, the father of all people or of none, concerned about everything or nothing. Only in His presence shall we learn that the glory of humankind is not in its will to power but in its power of compassion.

Do not assume that he who seeks to comfort you now, lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes do you good. His life may also have much sadness and difficulty, that remains far beyond yours. Were it otherwise, he would never have been able to find these words.

I want to believe that in any relational moment a person understands that the other person in front of them is just another human being.

If in thirst you drink water from a cup, you see God in it. Those who are not in love with God will see only their own faces in it.

The world doesn't grieve when you're grieving. The world goes on about its business. You're having a good day and I'm having a bad one and vice versa. And they could be very good and very bad at the same time. You multiply that by seven billion and you have one element of human experience.

This book [the Bible] speaks both the voice of God and the voice of humanity, for there is told in it the most convincing of human experience that has ever been written...and those who heed that story will know their strength and happiness and success are all summed up in the exhortation, "Fear God and keep His commandments."

The problem is whether we are determined to go in the direction of compassion or not. If we are, then can we reduce the suffering to a minimum? If I lose my direction, I have to look for the North Star, and I go to the north. That does not mean I expect to arrive at the North Star. I just want to go in that direction.