Incarnation Quotes

Writing that flirts with incoherence can just as readily flounder as writing characterized by simplicity and composure. There is no reliable formula for originality, and strategies that are distinguished as innovative in their first incarnation can quickly become stale in the hands of lesser artists. ~ Joanna Scott

What, then, of the priest's iconic representation of Christ at the altar? If there is no specifically masculine or feminine charism or ontology, the significance of the priest's maleness fades away. What matters - as patristic Christology recognized centuries ago with its dictum, 'That which is not assumed [by the Son of God in the incarnation] is not healed' - is that Christ became human, assuming and thereby healing the nature common to men and women. Although biologically a man, Christ assumed human nature in such a way as to include both men and women in his salvific work. And that means, in turn, that to refuse to allow a woman to preside at the Eucharist may be to say much more than opponents of women's ordination realize - namely, 'that women are not adequate icons of Christ.' The result, notes [Sarah] Hinlicky Wilson near the end of her book, is nothing less than 'to leave both their humanity and their salvation in doubt.' If women can't reflect the human nature of Christ at the altar, how then can they trust Christ's human nature to save them at all? ~ Wesley Hill

I would suggest that the theater is the art form that most fully offers us an opportunity to reflect on the Incarnation because it is the presentation of one body to another. ~ Mother Dolores Hart

When you start with legal holiness, you have eyes only for the cross, and you never see that in Jesus Christ, nothing less than the eternal trinitarian life of Father, Son and Spirit is being lived out inside human existence. You never really get the staggering meaning of the incarnation. ~ C. Baxter Kruger

Jesus displaced himself that we might know him. This is incarnational ministry, and it's the life we're called to. ~ Alia Joy

Examine your experience of the incarnation so far and realistically add up the moments of happiness and unhappiness and you tell me, oh somewhat vaguely nobly born, you tell me, what has it been like for you? ~ Frederick Lenz

The greatest threat to private wealth throughout history has always been institutionalized violence, the incarnation of which we have referred to as "the State" only over the past few centuries. This ~ Rahim Taghizadegan

I was blessed with suck in the form of the traditional Snow White coloring: skin as white as snow, lips as red as blood, and hair as black as coal. In the cartoons and the storybooks, they make it look almost cute. Of course, when artists and animators design a Snow White, they essentially give their incarnation of my story a spray tan and some neutral lip liner. A true seven-oh-nine was nowhere near as marketable as those animated darlings. We're too pale, and our lips are too red, and we look like something out of a horror movie that didn't have the decency to stay on the screen. ~ Seanan McGuire

Meditation is the study of making the mind still. As your mind becomes still, a power enters you. This power transmogrifies your mind, it escalates your evolution and you begin to cycle through many incarnations in one lifetime. ~ Frederick Lenz

You must come to see every human being Including yourself, As an incarnation In a body or personality, going through a certain Life experience which is functional. ~ Ram Dass

Apart from it, the incarnation and the ministry would lose all their significance, the crucifixion would be but a martyrdom, and the cross a symbol of the victory of death over life. By the Resurrection it was that the Crucified One was "declared to be the Son of God with power," the great truth on which the Christian's faith is founded, and to which his hope is anchored. That Christ died for our sins is the Gospel of the Christian religion regarded as a human cult. The Gospel of Christianity goes on to declare "That He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures" ~ Robert Anderson

The world proceeds from the same spirit as the body of man. It is a remoter and inferior incarnation of God, a projection of God in the unconscious. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Priesthood is not a convenient, historically conditioned form of Church organisation, but is rooted in the Incarnation, in the priesthood and mission of Christ himself. ~ Arthur Middleton

Long since on Mars and more strongly since he came to Perelandra, Ransom had been perceiving that the triple distinction of truth from myth and both from fact was purely terrestrial-was part and parcel of that unhappy distinction between soul and body which resulted from the fall. Even on earth the sacraments existed as a permanent reminder that the division was neither wholesome nor final. The Incarnation had been the beginning of its disappearance. In Perelandra it would have no meaning at all. ~ C.S. Lewis

Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this. ~ Margaret Atwood

Yet the history of media shows that this is just the modern incarnation of the timeless complaint of the intellectual elite, every time technology makes publishing easier, that the wrong sort of people will use it to publish the wrong sorts of things. ~ Tom Standage

I'd rather work all night and sleep all day ... perhaps I was a mole in my last incarnation. ~ Ida Lupino

Jesus shows us that there's never a change of mind unless there's a change of heart, and there will never be a change of heart without a conversation between trusted friends.

Halter, Hugh (2014-02-01). Flesh: Bringing the Incarnation Down to Earth (p. 167). David C. Cook. Kindle Edition. ~ Hugh Halter

There is no such thing as reincarnation, but only similar incarnation. ~ Abhijit Naskar

We hear in these days a great deal respecting rights
the rights of private judgment, the rights of labor, the rights of property, and the rights of man. Rights are grand things, divine things in this world of God's; but the way in which we expound these rights, alas! seems to me to be the very incarnation of selfishness. I can see nothing very noble in a man who is forever going about calling for his own rights. Alas! alas! for the man who feels nothing more grand in this wondrous, divine world than his own rights. ~ Frederick William Robertson

Some Christians mistrust or de-emphasize the role of the senses in spirituality, considering them to be inferior to reason and cognition. Such a view fails to appreciate the indispensable part of human personhood the senses actually form. It falls into the gnostic error of denying human embodiment. Because Christians affirm the goodness of the physical body and believe in the physicality of the incarnation, we should also affirm the importance of encountering God through our senses. God gave us senses to enrich our lives. They are channels that can be spiritually tuned so as to register the traces of the divine that saturate the world . . . it could be the sight of a child, the sound of birds
singing, the smell of flowers or freshly cut grass, or the feeling of warmth. Any of these things-and many more-can serve as a call to pause and, even if just for a moment, turn our heart toward God. ~ David G. Benner

We must primarily become seekers of God instead of founders of works, for work will not sustain us through the traumas of incarnation. ~ Viv Grigg

Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place. ~ Hans Urs Von Balthasar

I would venture to say that approaching the Christian Story from this direction, it has long been my feeling (a joyous feeling) that God redeemed the corrupt makingcreatures, men, in a way fitting to this aspect, as to others, of their strange nature. The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain many marvels - peculiarly artistic, beautiful, and moving: 'mythical' in their perfect, self-contained significance; and among the marvels is the greatest and most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. But this story has entered History and the primary world; the desire and aspiration of sub-creation has been raised to the fulfillment of Creation. The Birth of Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man's history. The Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the story of the Incarnation. This story begins and ends in joy. It has pre-eminently the 'inner consistency of reality'. There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true, and none which so many sceptical men have accepted as true on its own merits. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Art, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

The doctrine of the Incarnation, if accepted, puts this principle even more emphatically at the centre. The pattern is there in Nature because it was first there in God. ~ C.S. Lewis

When it was announced that Michael Keaton was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. When they announced that Val Kilmer was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. When it was announced that George Clooney was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. When it was announced that Christian Bale was going to be Batman, everyone was mad. And everyone was mad about Ben Affleck. So every single incarnation, people are going to be mad; you just can't do anything about it. ~ Baron Vaughn

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race ... and the hearts of the meanest were humbled. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Humility was an offensive characteristic for a God, in the eyes of early non-Christians. How could Christians worship a God who deliberately chose to share in human birth with all its mess and vulnerability and limitation, as well as a shameful death? How can we now worship a God to whom all the unimportant little details of our lives actually matter? How can we respect a God who takes us more seriously than we take ourselves, and yet is not impressed with all our accomplishments? Who loves us equally well, whetherwe succeed or fail? How could it really be that God simply disregards not only our education, our tastes, our industry, our niceness, our worthiness in order to love us? God's greatness we can begin to approach. The sheer humility of God's love is incomprehensible. ~ Roberta C. Bondi

That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now. ~ James Anthony Froude

If you'd like to have a better incarnation, then have one now. If that's your attitude, just let go and meditate and try to be as wise and compassionate, as understanding as you can. ~ Frederick Lenz

Perhaps you're not the next Buddha. Perhaps you're not the Maitreya. Perhaps that's not your job in this incarnation. Perhaps you have to enjoy life and learn about life through whatever way that you find yourself going. ~ Frederick Lenz

The nativity mystery "conceived from the Holy Spirit and born from the Virgin Mary", means, that God became human, truly human out of his own grace. The miracle of the existence of Jesus , his "climbing down of God" is: Holy Spirit and Virgin Mary! Here is a human being, the Virgin Mary, and as he comes from God, Jesus comes also from this human being. Born of the Virgin Mary means a human origin for God. Jesus Christ is not only truly God, he is human like every one of us. He is human without limitation. He is not only similar to us, he is like us. ~ Karl Barth

Like flowers we grow, bloom, and whither - each day and each life. In our next life we'll grow, bloom, and whither even more beautifully. But although we blossom more grandiose in each new life, all our lives are perfect in their own way. ~ Stefan Emunds

Christ's incarnation was less a reaction or response than it was a proactive demonstration of love: ~ John S. Dickerson

Art is the opposite of dissipation, in the physical and spiritual sense of the word: it is concentration, desire that seeks incarnation. ~ Octavio Paz

A soul mate is not necessarily someone with whom you set up housekeeping. Your soul and their soul have a multi-incarnation attraction. ~ Frederick Lenz

When we get married, we promise a person the rest of our lives, "Til death do us part". But what if in another life we promised someone forever? What if ten lifetimes ago we promised someone lifetime after lifetime after lifetime? Think about it. Maybe that's why marriages fail when they do fail. Because maybe promises are never really broken. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I've got to love the souls of people. Because I can't love every incarnation. I have to identify with my own soul. And then I can have such compassion for that soul who has an incarnation like George Bush. I feel compassion. That's karma of the here. Compassion and love, that's all. ~ Ram Dass

Suffering, sin, and evil are no longer located in God's will, but are understood as arising within a finite, open, developmental, and future-oriented creation. They are dealt with by the power of God's love revealed in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ. God's answer to the problem of woundedness and wickedness is not to show us now or in the eschaton how they fit into God's design or mosaic, but to show us how God overcomes the brokenness and maliciousness of the creation now and in the eschaton through the redemptive power of the cross and resurrection. Divine power is rethought as the suffering and transforming power of Jesus' cross and resurrection, not as the omnipotent power of the timeless will of God. Incarnation, instead of immutability, defines God's will and way. God is the suffering and transforming God. ~ Tyron Inbody

You are a little soul carrying about a corpse, as Epictetus used to say. ~ Marcus Aurelius

Painting is a form of incarnation. It is spirit made manifest in the world. ~ Jeffrey Smart

She knew, with all her heart that running away from the country's top relationship coach was as good as saying, 'there's no hope for me, ever'! ~ Diane Hall

Jesus loved the will of His Father. He embraced the limitations, the necessities, the conditions, the very chains of His humanity as He walked and worked here on earth, fulfilling moment by moment His divine commission and the stern demands of His incarnation. Never was there a word or even a look of complaint. ~ Elisabeth Elliot

People who are drawn to meditation have had lots of incarnation in the world of experience, and we know the score. We know that experience is great, but it's not enough. ~ Frederick Lenz

The Christian "doctrines" are translations into our concepts and ideas of that which God has already expressed in language more adequate, namely the actual incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection ~ C.S. Lewis

I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation. ~ Gerard Manley Hopkins

Now a Dark Age seemed to be passing. For twelve centuries, a small flame of knowledge had been kept smoldering in the monasteries; only now were there minds ready to be kindled. Long ago, during the last age of reason, certain proud thinkers had claimed that valid knowledge was indestructible - that ideas were deathless and truth immortal. But that was true only in the subtlest sense, the abbot thought, and not superficially true at all. There was objective meaning in the world, to be sure: the nonmoral logos or design of the Creator; but such meanings were God's and not Man's, until they found an imperfect incarnation, a dark reflection, within the mind and speech and culture of a given human society, which might ascribe values to the meanings so that they became valid in a human sense within the culture. For Man was a culture-bearer as well as a soul-bearer, but his cultures were not immortal and they could die with a race or an age, and then human reflections of meaning and human portrayals of truth receded, and truth and meaning resided, unseen, only in the objective logos of Nature and the ineffable Logos of God. Truth could be crucified; but soon, perhaps, a resurrection. ~ Walter M. Miller Jr.

All he wanted was enough time to consider all his options without being dragged into his household's petty squabbles or being nagged by his wife about that damnable pilgrimage. Was that so much to ask?
Apparently so, for he'd yet to find a peaceful moment at Caen, not with Marguerite sulking and Aimar lurking and Will acting put-upon and Geoff wanting to lay plans and Richard strutting around as if he were the incarnation of Roland and poor Tilda grieving over Maman's absence and his father refusing to heed any voice but his own. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

The people through which the Tradition of the Sun spoke were people just like anyone else, and who, one morning or one evening, looked at the world and felt the presence of something greater. They had unwittingly plunged into an unknown sea, and, for the most part, they did not do so again.
Everyone, at least once in each incarnation, possessed the secret of the Universe. ~ Paulo Coelho

There were more recent markings as well-initials scratched over the pictographs, some with dates. people were always wanting to announce their existence to the world in a way that would surpass the ages, creating some sort of immortality. For all Karigan knew, the more ancient carvings were just another incarnation of such an urge. ~ Kristen Britain

Poetry too is a little incarnation, giving body to what had been before invisible and inaudible. ~ C.S. Lewis

'Digiphrenia' is really the experience of trying to exist in more than one incarnation of yourself at the same time. There's your Twitter profile, there's your Facebook profile, there's your email inbox. And all of these sort of multiple instances of you are operating simultaneously and in parallel. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

The false argument has been used that only a man can represent a male Jesus. But this portrays an inadequate understanding of the incarnation. The Son of God, in assuming our humanity, became a man, not to sanctify maleness, but our common humanity so that, be we men or women, we can see the dignity and beauty of our humanity sanctified in him. ~ James B. Torrance

Spiritual God Realization (enlightenment) does not occur before or after the passing away of your physical incarnation. So no need to await death for Divine answers. Spiritual God Realization occurs at the very moment that you enter the eternal Now. Fully present as a Being in the Here and Now; the Holy Origin and Divine Destiny that All Beings share; All is One..... Namaste ~ Leland Lewis

We are shaped by what we're saturated in, which is why incarnation must always be paired with devotion. ~ Phileena Heuertz And Darren Prince

For my part, it is not the mystery of the incarnation which I discover in religion, but the mystery of social order, which associates with heaven that idea of equality which prevents the rich from destroying the poor ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things...I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas ~ Oscar Wilde

Thinking that the next person, the next relationship, the next experience will free you - these are foolish thoughts of people who are bound again and again to birth, death and rebrith for thousands and thousands of incarnations. ~ Frederick Lenz

As we shall see, it is only when we take fully into account the gospel writers' belief that Jesus was involved in the ultimate battle against the ultimate forces of evil that we can begin to see how their combination of kingdom and cross - and, looking wider, of incarnation, kingdom, cross, and resurrection - makes sense. ~ N. T. Wright

The adam and I had pondered the death many times since the day he brought me here. But despite our musing about an end of life and our search for evidence of death among fallen and decomposing fruit and the compost of leaves and the refuse of our industry, which we gathered to enrich the soil, I understood the death less well than the explosion that had filled the universe at its incarnation. In fact, every evidence of degrading life seemed only to point back to the sustenance of the living so that I grasped the idea of the death less and less the more I meditated upon it. ~ Tosca Lee

If God really became incarnate, and if His Incarnation can with justice compel man to change his life,then we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time ... What happens in the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist is something for which all religions of mankind have exressed longing, dimly sensed was coming, and as a rule even prefigured- the physical presence of the divine Logos made man, and the presence of his sacrificial death, in the midst of the congregation celebrating the mysteries. ~ Josef Pieper

That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It's getting late. The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. I ~ James Baldwin

Most of us are convinced that we are our egos, which is who we think we are. The ego is part of our incarnation. It dies with the body, which is why we are so afraid of death. Death scares the hell out of who you think you are, especially if you think you are this body. ~ Ram Dass

The incarnation is in itself an unfathomable mystery, but it makes sense of everything else that the New Testament contains. ~ J.I. Packer

I couldn't feel guilty any longer for misdeeds committed by another incarnation. I wouldn't. "I'm sorry for your past, Aric. I wish it had been different. I wish I had been. But I refuse to keep paying for what I did in past games.""Do you, then?"
"In our first meeting, you skewered me with your sword. In other words: you started it. You didn't ask me to marry you, just ordered it. I played the hand I was dealt."
"I take your point."
"Let's begin anew, Empress." (He expects her to 'forgive/forget' for him but not Jack?) "The mortal can't provide for you like I can. I offer you a home. Defensive, I said, "Jack plans to rebuild Haven House for me."
Anger flashed across Aric's face. He schooled his reactions as quickly as he did everything else, leaving his emotions to seethe beneath the surface. "If you desire something, all you have to do is tell me. It will shortly be yours. You'll see soon enough." (Bribery for her to favor him?)
What if Aric could straight-up end the game? Blow up the machine?
"Deveaux will never understand you as I do. As only another Arcana can." "Maybe not. But we have other ties." I thought of the ribbon he'd kept all this time, the one now in my pocket.
"As do we. We are wed." (after Aric ordered her to do so.) "I think of you as mine.
"When I recognized that you weren't over your infatuation with the mortal, I might have been . . . testing you." He'd tested me the other night as well! "What if I'd surrendered?" ~ Kresley Cole

The missionary spirit is the spirit of Jesus, the spirit of the incarnation and the cross. ~ Hudson Taylor

The deepest longings we feel on earth, as parents, as lovers, are mere flickers of the hungering desire God feels for us. It is a desire that cost him the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. ~ Philip Yancey

You get used to it. And that surprises me. You get used to diminishment, to a body that is stalled, an impediment? Well, yes, you do. An alter ego is amazed, aghast perhaps--myself in the roaring forties, when robust health was an assumption, a given, something you barely noticed because it was always there. Acceptance has set in, somehow, has crept up on you, which is just as well, because the alternative--perpetual rage and resentment--would not help matters. You are now this other person, your earlier selves are out there, familiar, well remembered, but you have to come to terms with a different incarnation. ~ Penelope Lively

The Bible is still the only dirty book I've ever read, at least in its current incarnation as a weapon of the homophobes. Bible scholarship keeps trying to catch up, proving that all the hatred of gay is just stupid translation, though the snake-oil preachers don't want to hear it. ~ Paul Monette

The cross is the centre of the world's history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifiction of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was the spirit of prophecy, and the growing power of Jesus is the spirit of history ~ Alexander MacLaren

The Incarnation is the ultimate reason why the service of God cannot be divorced from the service of man. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Enlightenment does not put an end to awareness. It puts an end to limited awareness. It doesn't necessarily put an end to incarnation. It puts an end to reincarnation. ~ Frederick Lenz

The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal." "It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals ... and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some strange new disguise. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Old man," she said. "Don't you want to prepare or something?"
"Prepare what?"
"Yourself. For death."
Siri laughed.
"Well, Bpoo. Let's see. If the Buddhists are right, I'm just on my way to the next incarnation. Unless there's a manual for how to behave correctly as a gnat I'm not sure how I'd prepare for that. If the Catholics are right, nothing short of an asbestos suit and a glass of iced water will help where I'm going. And if the communists are right, you do your best and when you're gone they put up a statue in your honor and the locals dry their laundry on it. So, if I'm going, you're the heir to today's legacy. ~ Colin Cotterill

Every incarnation that we remember must increase our comprehension of ourselves as who we are. ~ Aleister Crowley

In its current incarnation in my life touring is a lot of airports and hotels and car services and only OK food. ~ Jami Attenberg

Egos are drawn to bigger egos. Darkness cannot recognize light. Only light can recognize light. So don't believe that the light is outside you or that it can only come through one particular form. If only your master is an incarnation of God, then who are you? Any kind of exclusivity is identification with form, and identification with form means ego, no matter how well disguised. Use the master's presence to reflect your own identity beyond name and form back to you and to become more intensely present yourself. You will soon realize that there is no "mine" or "yours" in presence. Presence is one. ~ Eckhart Tolle

I see Christ as the incarnation of the piper who is calling us. He dances that shape and pattern which is at the heart of our reality. ~ Sydney Carter

When we pray "Let your kingdom come," we aren't asking God to bring history to an end and whisk us to realms of glory, or to wave a magic wand and solve all the problems we face in our life. Rather, we are making a radical commitment to live our life in the world ("on earth") in such loving abandonment to God that the values and principles, the perspectives and dynamics of God's realm of life and wholeness become incarnate in and through our being and doing. Here too we are utterly incapable of actualizing the kingdom in this way. We can, however, through loving abandonment, allow God to incarnate kingdom life in and through us in the circumstances of our daily life. ~ M. Robert Mulholland Jr.

There is only one all pervading God. It has only one message - Love all, encompass all and transcend the limits of the selfish gene. ~ Amit Ray

There is a pre-existing harmony in everything. The problem is the human being. It may be true that one single Incarnation of God may not he able to bring that peace and harmony in the entire world. It's only because of that harmony that they could create in the world and in people's mind that the world still exists and that there is always a balance. Otherwise, things could be much worse. ~ Mata Amritanandamayi

The purpose and cause of the incarnation was that
He might illuminate the world by His wisdom
and excite it to the love of Himself. ~ Peter Abelard

Never for one minute have I taken you for reality . . . You are a lie, you are my illness, you are a phantom . . . You are my hallucination. You are the incarnation of myself . . . of my thoughts and feelings, but only the nastiest and stupidest of them. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The church's primary purpose is not to make America more Christian, but to make American Christians less American and Rwandan Christians less Rwandan. We are no longer Rwandans or Americans, neither Hutu nor Tutsi. If we are in Christ, we have become part of a new creation. ~ Emmanuel M. Katongole

I was a big Mickey Rourke fan in his first incarnation. I thought that at the time he was America's greatest screen actor. ~ Jamie Sives

One of the awful things about writing when you are a Christian is that for you the ultimate reality is the Incarnation, the present reality is the Incarnation, and nobody believes in the Incarnation; that is, nobody in your audience. My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for. ~ Flannery O'Connor

We do not serve a distant and detached God who spouts encouraging cliches safely from the sideline. Instead, he enters into our suffering. Jesus did it in the Incarnation and his Spirit does it in us now. God will never leave us alone in our suffering. ~ Rick Warren

The ego is frightened by death, because ego is part of the incarnation and ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment. ~ Ram Dass

Do not worry about the incarnation of ideas. If you are a poet, your works will contain them without your knowledge'they will be both moral and national if you follow your inspiration freely. ~ Vissarion Belinsky

Christmas in Bethlehem. The ancient dream: a cold, clear night made brilliant by a glorious star, the smell of incense, shepherds and wise men falling to their knees in adoration of the sweet baby, the incarnation of perfect love. ~ Lucinda Franks

The soul is not part of the incarnation. It comes into the incarnation. And the soul is not afraid of death because it has done it so many times. ~ Ram Dass

Bonhoeffer's recurring theme of incarnation - that God did not create us to be disembodied spirits, but flesh-and-blood human beings - led him to the idea that the Christian life must be modeled. Jesus did not only communicate ideas and concepts and rules and principles for living. He lived. And by living with his disciples, he showed them what life was supposed to look like, what God had intended it to look like. It was not merely intellectual or merely spiritual. It was all these things together; it was something more. Bonhoeffer aimed to model the Christian life for his students. ~ Eric Metaxas

Once you are enlightened, you don't do wrong things. You don't take to wrong things. Then you start understanding all these prophets, all these great incarnations, you start understanding what they were. Then you understand that all these religions have come out of one Tree of Life, which is spirituality. ~ Nirmala Srivastava

Spiritual partners bond with an understanding that they are together because it is appropriate for their souls to grow together.

They recognize that their growth may take them to the end of their days in this incarnation and beyond, or it may take them to six months.

They cannot say that they will be together forever. The duration of their partnership is determined by how long it is appropriate for their evolution to be together.

All of the vows that a human being can take cannot prevent the spiritual path from exploding through and breaking those vows if the spirit must move on. It is appropriate for spiritual partners to remain together only as long as they grow together. ~ Gary Zukav

The Incarnation, which is for traditional Christianity synonymous with the historical birth and earthly life of Christ, is for mystics of a certain type, not only this but also a perpetual Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the universe and also in the individual ascending soul, of the divine and perfect Life, the pure character of God, of which the one historical life dramatized the essential constituents. Hence the soul, like the physical embryo, resumes in its upward progress the spiritual life-history of the race. "The one secret, the greatest of all," says Patmore, is "the doctrine of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago, but as an event which is renewed in the body of every one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny." 239 ~ Evelyn Underhill

For want of a Pilate of their own, some Christians would accept a Constantine or whomever might be the current incarnation of Caesar. ~ Wendell Berry

As incarnations go by, the atom gets more complex. That is, your being, the part of you that reincarnates from lifetime to lifetime, the aggregate, grows thicker and denser. ~ Frederick Lenz

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo. ~ Frantz Fanon

How very lovable her face was to him. Yet there was nothing ethereal about it; all was real vitality, real warmth, real incarnation. And it was in her mouth that this culminated. Eyes almost as deep and speaking he had seen before, and cheeks perhaps as fair; brows as arched, a chin and throat almost as shapely; her mouth he had seen nothing to equal on the face of the earth. To a young man with the least fire in him that little upward lift in the middle of her red top lip was distracting, infatuating, maddening. He had never before seen a woman's lips and teeth which forced upon his mind with such persistent iteration the old Elizabethan simile of roses filled with snow.
Perfect, he, as a lover, might have called them off-hand. But no - they were not perfect. And it was the touch of the imperfect upon the would-be perfect that gave the sweetness, because it was that which gave the humanity. ~ Thomas Hardy