Quotes About Providence

They were in Cranston, a down-at-the-heels, mostly white bedroom community below Providence, facing a small brick apartment building wedged against the junction of an expressway and a ninety-degree overpass—the home of John Neri, like them an anonymous floor-worker in a long-gone gray underworld. The air was thrumming with the sounds of endlessly passing traffic.

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. It's smell and it's color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.

My mother says, "It's not brains or good looks that a person needs, it's luck.

Who says you need luck to be lucky?" my mother answered, looking at me. Search me what that means.

It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

We tell ourselves how lovely it would be, would it not, if there were a God who created the universe and benign Providence, a moral world order, and life beyond the grave, yet it is very evident, is it not, that all of this is the way we should inevitably wish it to be. And it would be even more remarkable if our poor, ignorant bondsman ancestors had managed to solve all these difficult cosmic questions.

We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.

We are naturally grieved over the fact that a just God and a kindly providence do not guard us better against such influences in our most defenseless age. We thereby gladly forget that as a matter of fact everything in our life is accident from our very origin through the meeting of spermatozoa and ovum, accident, which nevertheless participates in the lawfulness and fatalities of nature, and lacks only the connection to our wishes and illusions.

Those who believe they have discerned the particular designs of Providence resemble professors who give themselves to what they call 'explication of the text' at the expense of a beautiful poem.

As for us, we are nailed in place, free only to direct our gaze, subject to necessity. A blind mechanism, which takes no account of the degree of spiritual perfection, continually tosses people and throws some of them at the foot of the Cross. It depends only on them to keep—or not—their eyes turned towards God through the shaking. It is not that the providence of God is absent. It is by His providence that God willed necessity as a blind mechanism.

God sees as clearly in the dark as in the day; he knows what he is doing and where he is going. He can even weave the dark threads of man's evil deeds, tragedies, and disasters into his purposes and use them for his glory.

Emily and Harry McKee made Sam blush by the cheery openness with which they informed him that they intended to have only three children, but to have those with celerity and to have them perfect. (They apparently possessed more control of Providence than was understood by such an innocent as Sam.)

they] reason'd high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate, Fixt Fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost. (Paradise Lost 2.658

Illness is merely the bitter, which a wise Providence mingles in the cup of life.

It was as if God Himself planned my visit to the church that day.

God predetermines the pathways.

In the life of a Christian, there are no accidents, only Divine appointments.

The world was all before them, where to chooseTheir place of rest, and Providence their guide:They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slowThrough Eden took their solitary way.

What in me is darkIllumine, what is low raise and support;That to the height of this great argumentI may assert eternal Providence,And justify the ways of God to men.

Others apart sat on a hill retir'd,In thoughts more elevate, and reason'd highOf Providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate,Fix'd fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,And found no end, in wand'ring mazes lost.

That powerWhich erring men call Chance.

Who is there who speaks and it happens—unless the Lord has ordained it?" Lamentations 3:37

We have sometimes escaped from grave dangers not by any wisdom or foresight of our own, but by the intervention of unforeseen circumstances. So both the revelation of Scripture and our own individual experiences confirm the wisdom and good providence of God. He watches over His people from the earliest moment of their lives. He overrules and guards them through all their blind wanderings and leads them in a way that they know not.