Quotes About God

But the issue is not only life and death but our existence before God and our being judged by him. All of us were sinners before him and worthy of condemnation.

To be sure, the response of faith to revelation, which God grants to the creature he chooses and moves with his love, occurs in such a way that it is truly the creature that provides the response, with its own nature and its natural powers of love.

The flight away from self to God is not a "forgetting self" in the sense that man thereby loses himself. Rather, in the experience of the Spirit there is bestowed on man the deepest possible experience of himself: for the Holy Spirit is a Spirit of revelation which illuminates the human spirit, in which it is immanent, by telling man what he is.

God loves us, not such as we are by our merit, but such as we will be by his own gift]

We dwell in the place in which we are not traveling but are at home. The landscape of God's self-revelation in Jesus Christ is our home. It is a landscape that we are never finished exploring, for new prospects are always emerging. Nevertheless, it is familiar to us and becomes all the more familiar the longer we reside there.

The Fathers of the Church say that prayer, properly understood, is nothing other than becoming a longing for God.

It is impossible to contemplate the word without the serious intention of doing justice to it in practical behavior. It demands love for God and our neighbor, and does so with such immediacy and unmistakable urgency that it is pointless even to pause before this demand unless we are willing to respond.

The theme, then, that will be with us throughout this study is the reciprocal relationship of God's transcendence and God's immanence;

God is so wide that, within his spaciousness, even the longing for unfulfillable longing can soar freely.

For us humans, that will mean that our obedience, which we owe to our Creator and Lord and to all his direct and indirect commands, can be, in Jesus Christ, and even must be, an expression of our love; so that any love of God or other human beings which excludes obedience, or wishes to get beyond it, does not at all deserve the name love.

Nature, then, is incapable of conceiving what lies above nature. As a consequence, no creature can achieve divinization for itself naturally, simply because it cannot grasp God. It belongs wholly to God's grace to distribute divinization by grace, according to the measure of each being, to enlighten nature with supernatural light and to lift it above its own limitations by the superabundance of glory.45

It is as if the fact that God is light, penetrating and manifesting everything, is so absolutely important that darkness and bondage can and must exist for the light's sake.

Maximus, along with the tradition reaching from Philo to Gregory of Nyssa, says we can only know God's existence—know that he is14—not his essence, or what he is.

he praises the unknowability of the world and the miracles, far exceeding all comprehension, that lie hidden in the unfathomable depths of the least of its parts. Only such a sense of reverence can be the true presupposition for knowing the far more unknowable God.

Dios no se enfrenta sólo a lo antidivino desde fuera o desde arriba, sino que se da la situación inaudita de que se expone a su fascinación para pinchar desde dentro el deslumbrante globo de colores. O por mejor decir, utilizando el símbolo de Jonás, para matar desde dentro al monstruo devorador.

this synthesis of God and the world is a divine idea, which is older and more deeply hidden than all things and for which everything else remains simply an approach, a means of achievement.64

the Christian must hold that all created being, whether substance or accident, comes from nothing and therefore stands far below God's being in dignity;

God is not "Being" but beyond being, because being necessarily includes multiplicity.98 Yet this "many", as Maximus explains along with Pseudo-Dionysius, is always such only because of unity.

can only be conceived as a shuttling back and forth within the bounds of finitude, while genuine unity withdraws beyond the circle of creation into the realm of the inconceivable. So "every created thing has the divine and ineffable monad, which is God himself, as its origin and its end, because it comes forth from him and ultimately returns to him"

is gleaned from both "books" together. The "contemplation of nature" (?????? ??????) and of the structures of meaning (?????) hidden within it, structures that are part of every single being, becomes for Maximus a necessary step, a kind of initiation, into the knowledge of God.

person and existence are forced to draw together, and from the same depths of being—which is more than all intelligible essence—arises the invitation of a personal God to his created child, an event that belongs to another realm altogether than all the in-built natural orientations—however mystical—of intellectual beings.

CredinÈ›a este lumina lui Dumnezeu care lumineaz? în?untrul omului.

the goal God sets for the world is now not simply dissolution in him alone but the fulfillment and preservation also of the created realm, "without confusion (?????????)", in the Incarnation of his Son.

He is such all the more in that through this—concretely, through his Cross—he can demonstrate his infinite gratitude to the Father. And in doing precisely that, he will be allowed to prove to the creatures that God, despite all appearances, is the love that goes all the way "to the end" (Jn 13:1) of its possibilities.