Beatitude Quotes

Now the standard cure for one who is sunk is to consider those in actual destitution or physical suffering - this is an all-weather beatitude for gloom in general and fairly salutary day-time advice for everyone. But at three o'clock in the morning, a forgotten package has the same tragic importance as a death sentence, and the cure doesn't work - and in a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning, day after day. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

It was truly very good reason that we should be beholden to God only, and to the favour of his grace, for the truth of so noble a belief, since from his sole bounty we receive the fruit of immortality, which consists in the enjoyment of eternal beatitude ... The more we give and confess to owe and render to God, we do it with the greater Christianity. ~ Michel De Montaigne

Anchorites used to ill-treat themselves in the way they did, so that the common people would not begrudge them the beatitude they would enjoy in heaven. ~ Cesare Pavese

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as "truths" - that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of "the Son of God" does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an "eternal" fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the "kingdom of God," and of the "sonship of God." Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a "kingdom of God" that is to come, of a "kingdom of heaven" beyond, and of a "son of God" as the second person of the Trinity. All this - if I may be forgiven the phrase - is like thrusting one's fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols "Father" and "Son" - not, of course, to every one - : the word "Son" expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and "Father" expresses that feeling itself - the sensation of eternity and of perfection. - I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian "f ~ Nietszche

Expect neither reward nor beatitude. Return noble waves for ignoble. ~ Jean Cocteau

A child of God should be a visible beatitude for joy and happiness, and a living doxology for gratitude and adoration. ~ Charles Spurgeon

I was set free! I dissolved in the sea, became white sails and flying spray, became beauty and rhythm, became moonlight and the ship and the high dim-starred sky! I belonged, without past or future, within peace and unity and a wild joy, within something greater than my own life, or the life of Man, to Life itself!.. And several other times in my life, when I was swimming far out, or lying alone on a beach, I have had the same experience, became the sun, the hot sand, green seaweed anchored to a rock, swaying in the tide. Like a saint's vision of beatitude. Like the veil of things as they seem drawn back by an unseen hand. For a second you see, and seeing the secret, you are the secret. For a second there is meaning! Then the hand lets the veil fall and you are alone, lost in the fog again, and you stumble on towards nowhere for no good reason. ~ Eugene O'Neill

There's one blessing only, the source and cornerstone of beatitude: confidence in self. ~ Seneca The Younger

Creativity is secondary, meditation is basic and fundamental; everything should come out of your meditation. Then it will give you a beatitude, your being a new song, and it will help others to experience something of it. It will depend on their meditativeness. ~ Rajneesh

Human consciousness is a law of nature. Humankind's inherent intelligence is an indivisible component inalterably linked to the whole beatitude of the natural world. We experience truth, beauty, goodness, harmony, and bliss when we live in the light of the soul. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
[Matt 5:4] ~ Anonymous

The women looked from one to the other, knowing what the men didn't know. We knew the heartbeat and interior graces, compensation for our own clumsiness; the beatitude as we renounced our bodies, our noble little parasites the higher calling. We knew, without saying, the watery rollover, tremor, seismic shudders, the steadiness of the baby's hiccups, the reliable stab from a kick to the kidney ~ Naomi Levy

is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed' was the ninth beatitude." Alexander Pope (1688-1744), English poet ~ Robert Courtade

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes
to me a beatitude
is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women
or men
can suffer is to be bereft of their past. ~ Shirley Abbott

A little drowsing cat is an image of perfect beatitude. ~ Champfleury

A civilization is integral and healthy to the extent [that] it is founded on the "invisible" or "underlying" religion, the religio perennis, that is, to the extent [that] its expressions or forms are transparent to the Non-Formal and tend toward the Origin, thus conveying the recollection of a lost Paradise, but also - and with all the more reason - the presentiment of a timeless Beatitude. For the Origin is at once within us and before us; time is but a spiral movement around a motionless Center. ~ Frithjof Schuon

Crouchers move through a garden at a stoop: naming, gasping, horraying, admiring or coveting plants; Gapers saunter, smiling or sighing at what they find, succumbing to an intangible beatitude that takes them for a brief escape into another dimension. Both sorts of gardener are besotted; both get their hands dirty; think and talk gardening; but on the threshold of another's garden, each use a different set of whiskers. ~ Mirabel Osler

I think Dante would agree with you. Even though Beatrice married someone else and died young, Dante loved her his entire life. The love was a part of him, because to him, Beatrice was ideal. He barely knew her, had only met her twice, but yet he truly claimed to love her. Can anyone tell me why?"No one spoke up. Carmine sighed exasperatedly. This lesson was becoming frustrating to sit through. "Because he really loved the person she made him. It has just as much to do with how he felt as it did with who she was.""You're right," Mrs. Chavis said. "Dante said of her, 'she has ineffable courtesy, is my beatitude, the destroyer of all vices and the queen of virtue, salvation.' To him, she was his savior, the epitome of good. She rid him of his evil, made him feel worthwhile. That, we could argue, may be what he loved most of all. ~ J.M. Darhower

We do not weary of eating and sleeping every day, for hunger and sleepiness recur. Without that we should weary of them. So, without the hunger for spiritual things, we weary of them. Hunger after righteousness
the eighth beatitude. ~ Blaise Pascal

The pure power of a life can manifest as beatitude, or as an unspeakable, sheer violence ... ~ Jane Bennett

[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego's immolation. How beautiful it all seemed at the time of the Enlightenment, that man triumphant would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty, and beatitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famines, and folly was to result therefrom. ~ Malcolm Muggeridge

It is the Spirit of God that actively sustains every form and force in the universe; yet He is transcendental and aloof in the blissful uncreated void beyond the worlds of vibratory phenomena," Master explained. "Saints who realize their divinity even while in the flesh know a similar twofold existence. Conscientiously engaging in earthly work, they yet remain immersed in an inward beatitude. The Lord has created all men from the limitless joy of His being. Though they are painfully cramped by the body, God nevertheless expects that souls made in His image shall ultimately rise above all sense identifications and reunite with Him. ~ Paramahansa Yogananda

But now I want to say things that comfort me and that are a little free. For example: Thursdat is a day transparent as an insect's wing in the light. Just as Monday is a compact day. Ultimately, far beyond thought, I live from these ideas, if ideas is what they are. They are sensations that transform into ideas because I must use words. Even just using them mentally. The primary thought thinks with words. ~ Clarice Lispector

To covet beatitude is also avarice. ~ Osho

God creates, not that there may be witnesses to render Him His due glory, but beings who shall rejoice in it as He rejoices in it Himself and who, participating in His being, participate at the same time in His beatitude. It is not therefore for Himself, but for us, that God seeks His glory; it is not to gain it, for He posses it already, nor to increase it, for already it is perfect, but to communicate it to us. ~ Etienne Gilson

On one hand the Christian missionaries sought to convert the heathen, by fire and sword if need be, to the gospel of peace, brotherhood, and heavenly beatitude; on the other, the more venturesome spirits wished to throw off the constraining traditions and customs, and begin life afresh, levelling distinctions of class, eliminating superfluities and luxuries, privileges and distinctions, and hierarchical rank. In short, to go back to the Stone Ages, before the institutions of Bronze Age civilization had crystallized. Though the Western hemisphere was indeed inhabited, and many parts of it were artfully cultivated, so much of it was so sparsely occupied that the European thought of it as a virgin continent against whose wildness he pitted his manly strength. In one mood the European invaders preached the Christian gospel to the native idolaters, subverted them with strong liquors, forced them to cover their nakedness with clothes, and worked them to an early death in mines; in another, the pioneer himself took on the ways of the North American Indian, adopted his leather costume, and reverted to the ancient paleolithic economy: hunting, fishing, gathering shellfish and berries, revelling in the wilderness and its solitude, defying orthodox law and order, and yet, under pressure, improvising brutal substitutes. The beauty of that free life still haunted Audubon in his old age. ~ Lewis Mumford

Tea with us became more than an idealisation of the form of drinking; it is a religion of the art of life. The beverage grew to be an excuse for the worship of purity and refinement, a sacred function at which the host and guest joined to produce for that occasion the utmost beatitude of the mundane. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

And none of this necessarily has any bearing on the issue of the existence or non-existence of a God. What I'm saying is that the thought of the man and the way this thinking-feeling can reach an extreme degree of incommunicability - that, without sophism or paradox, is at the same time, for that man, the point of greatest communication. He communicates with himself. ~ Clarice Lispector

Blessed is the man who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed was the ninth beatitude. ~ Alexander Pope

1877. The vocation of humanity is to show forth the image of God and to be transformed into the image of the Father's only Son. This vocation takes a personal form since each of us is called to enter into the divine beatitude; it also concerns the human community as a whole. ~ The Catholic Church

There is no Beatitude for the lonesome.
The Book doesn't say they are blessed. ~ James Leo Herlihy

In just the last issue of Science Today there had been an article on some new psychotropic agents of the group of so-called benignimizers (the N,N-dimethylpeptocryptomides), which induced states of undirected joy and beatitude. Yes, yes! I could practically see that article now. Hedonidil, Euphoril, Inebrium, Felicitine, Empathan, Ecstasine, Halcyonal and a whole spate of derivatives. Though by replacing an amino group with a hydroxyl, you obtained instead Furiol, Antagonil, Rabiditine, Sadistizine, Dementium, Flagellan, Juggernol and many other polyparanoidal stimulants of the group of so-called phrensobarbs (for these prompted the most vicious behavior, the lashing out at objects animate as well as inanimate - and especially powerful here were the cannibal-cannabinols and manicomimetics). ~ Stanislaw Lem

Perfect joy excludes even the very feeling of joy, for in the soul filled by the object no corner is left for saying 'I'. We cannot imagine such joys when they are absent, thus the incentive for seeking them is lacking. ~ Simone Weil

Time is but a shadow, a dream; already God sees us in glory and takes joy in our eternal beatitude. How this thought helps my soul! I understand then why He lets us suffer. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

Beatitude starts in the moment when the act of thinking has freed itself from the necessity of form. Beatitude starts at the moment when the thinking-feeling has surpassed the author's need to thinking - he no longer needs to think and now finds himself close to the grandeur of the nothing. I could say of the "everything". But "everything" is a quanitity, and quantity has a limit in its very beginning. The true incommensurability is the nothing, which has no barriers adn where a person can scatter their thinking-feeling. ~ Clarice Lispector

The meaning of words has become so blurred by past usage that 'abstract' is identified with 'vague' and 'unreal,' and 'inwardness' with a sort of traditional beatitude ... The conception of the word 'plastic' has also been limited by individual interpretations. ~ Piet Mondrian

That there was, indeed, beauty and harmony in those abnormal moments, that they really contained the highest synthesis of life, he could not doubt, nor even admit the possibility of doubt. He felt that they were not analogous to the fantastic and unreal dreams due to intoxication by hashish, opium or wine. Of that he could judge, when the attack was over. These instants were characterized--to define it in a word--by an intense quickening of the sense of personality. Since, in the last conscious moment preceding the attack, he could say to himself, with full understanding of his words: "I would give my whole life for this one instant," then doubtless to him it really was worth a lifetime. For the rest, he thought the dialectical part of his argument of little worth; he saw only too clearly that the result of these ecstatic moments was stupefaction, mental darkness, idiocy. No argument was possible on that point. His conclusion, his estimate of the "moment," doubtless contained some error, yet the reality of the sensation troubled him. What's more unanswerable than a fact? And this fact had occurred. The prince had confessed unreservedly to himself that the feeling of intense beatitude in that crowded moment made the moment worth a lifetime. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When I can stand in mystery (not knowing and not needing to know and being dazzled by such freedom), when I don't need to split, to hate, to dismiss, to compartmentalize what I cannot explain or understand, when I can radically accept that "I am what I am what I am," then I am beginning to stand in divine freedom (Galatians 5:1). We do not know how to stand there on our own. Someone Else needs to sustain us in such a deep and spacious place. This is what the saints mean by our emptiness, our poverty and our nothingness. They are not being negative or self-effacing, but just utterly honest about their inner experience. God alone can sustain me in knowing and accepting that I am not a saint, not at all perfect, not very loving at all - and in that very recognition I can fall into the perfect love of God. Remember Jesus' first beatitude: "How happy are the poor in spirit, theirs is the kingdom of God" (Matthew 5:3). How amazing is that? I think this might just be the description of salvation and perfect freedom. They are the same, you know. ~ Richard Rohr

That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. ~ Thomas Aquinas

In the mind of a true snob there are certain limited criteria to denote the value of human existence. Jimmie's criteria were: home, hearth, wife, land. Those who possessed these had beatitude unchallengable. Other men had accidental, random life. Nothing better. ~ Thomas Keneally