“It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

Source: Individuality From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Robert G. Ingersoll 439

Union United States Army officer 1833–1899

Charles Fletcher Dole (1845–1927) Unitarian minister, speaker, and writer

The Coming People (1897).

“He whose soul is charged with awareness of God earns his inner livelihood by a passionate desire to pour his life into the eternal wells of love. … We do not live for our own sake. Life would be preposterous if not for the love it confers.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 333
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)
Context: He whose soul is charged with awareness of God earns his inner livelihood by a passionate desire to pour his life into the eternal wells of love. … We do not live for our own sake. Life would be preposterous if not for the love it confers.
Faith implies no denial of evil, no disregard of danger, no whitewashing of the abominable. He whose heart is given to faith is mindful of the obstructive and awry, of the sinister and pernicious. It is God's strange dominion over both good and evil on which he relies. … Faith is not a mechanical insurance but a dynamic, personal act, flowing between the heart of man and the love of God.

“I cannot believe that there is any being in this universe who has created a human soul for eternal pain. I would rather that every god would destroy himself; I would rather that we all should go to eternal chaos, to black and starless night, than that just one soul should suffer eternal agony.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

What Must We Do To Be Saved? (1880) http://www.gutenberg.org/files/38801/38801-h/38801-h.htm Section X, "The Evangelical Alliance."

“Truth is so great a perfection, that if God would render himself visible to men, he would choose light for his body and truth for his soul.”

Pythagoras (-585–-495 BC) ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher

As quoted in A Dictionary of Thoughts: Being a Cyclopedia of Laconic Quotations from the Best Authors of the World, both Ancient and Modern (1908) by Tyron Edwards, p. 592

“The love of fame, as it enters at times into his mind, is only another name for the love of excellence; or it is the ambition to attain the highest excellence, sanctioned by the highest authority — that of time.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

Lectures on the English Poets http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16209/16209.txt (1818), Lecture VIII, "On the Living Poets"

“You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise… guided by your own virtue and highest ambition”

Philippa Gregory (1954) English novelist

“But the soul which has been polluted, and is impure at the time of her departure, and is the companion and servant of the body always, and is in love with and fascinated by the body and by the desires and pleasures of the body, until she is led to believe that the truth exists only in bodily form, which a man may touch and see and taste and use for the purposes of his lusts—the soul, I mean, accustomed to hate and fear and avoid the intellectual principle, which to the bodily eye is dark and invisible, and can be attained only by philosophy—do you suppose that such a soul as this will depart pure and unalloyed?”

Socrates (-470–-399 BC) classical Greek Athenian philosopher

Plato, Phaedo

“It cannot be denied that God in choosing and destining Mary to be the Mother of his Son, granted her the highest honor.”

John Calvin (1509–1564) French Protestant reformer

Calvini Opera, Braunshweig-Berlin, 1863-1900, Volume 45, 348, (1877-78)

“It is always my endeavour however in making a picture that it should be without a companion in the world. At least such should be a painters ambition.”

John Constable (1776–1837) English Romantic painter

Letter to a client, Mr Carpenter (23 July 1828), as quoted in Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams, Constable (Tate Gallery Publications, London, 1993), p. 291
1820s

“God, being a great abyss, to men his depth reveals
Who climb the highest peak of the eternal hills”

Angelus Silesius (1624–1677) German writer

The Cherubinic Wanderer

“It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.”

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Robert G. Ingersoll 439

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