Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
Blaise PascalRead
In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.
Interpretation
Faith provides clarity for believers while casting doubt for non-believers.
This quote by Blaise Pascal highlights the dual nature of faith. It suggests that belief can offer guidance and understanding, illuminating one's path, whereas a lack of faith may lead to confusion and fear, akin to being blinded by shadows. Essentially, belief shapes our perception of reality, allowing some to see hope and purpose while leaving others in uncertainty.
In practice
In a speech about overcoming challenges, one might quote this to illustrate how perspective affects our realities.
Justice and power must be brought together, so that whatever is just may be powerful, and whatever is powerful may be just.
If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous . . . There are two equally dangerous extremes: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason.
Those are weaklings who know the truth and uphold it as long as it suits their purpose, and then abandon it.
Jesus is the God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.
If he exalts himself, I humble him. If he humbles himself, I exalt him. And I go on contradicting him Until he understands That he is a monster that passes all understanding.
What use is it to us to hear it said of a man that he has thrown off the yoke that he does not believe there is a God to watch over his actions, that he reckons himself the sole master of his behavior, and that he does not intend to give an account of it to anyone but himself?
Often when religious leaders come together, they talk about a particular sexual ethic, or an abstruse doctrine, as though this, rather than compassion, was the test of spiritual life.
The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die?
If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.
And when the hourglass has run out, the hourglass of temporality, when the noise of secular life has grown silent and its restless or ineffectual activism has come to an end, when everything around you is still, as it is in eternity, then eternity asks you and every individual in these millions and millions about only one thing: whether you have lived in despair or not.
I cannot discover that anyone knows enough to say definitely what is and what is not possible.
Yoga is a mirror to look at ourselves from within.
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