“We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.”

— Annie Dillard, book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Source: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

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Annie Dillard63

American writer 1945

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“Any three-year-old can see how unsatisfactory and clumsy is this whole business of reproducing and dying by the billions. We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet. There is not a people in the world that behaves as badly as praying mantises. But wait, you say, there is no right and wrong in nature; right and wrong is a human concept. Precisely: we are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die—does not care if it itself grinds to a halt. It is fixed and blind, a robot programmed to kill. We are free and seeing; we can only try to outwit it at every turn to save our skins.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

" The Force That Drives the Flower https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1973/11/the-force-that-drives-the-flower/308963/", The Atlantic, Nov. 1973

“Kind hearts are here; yet would the tenderest one
Have limits to its mercy; God has none.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 409.

“The way is long and dreary,
The path is bleak and bare;
Our feet are worn and weary,
But we will not despair;
More weary was Thy burden,
More desolate Thy ways,
O Lamb of God, who takest
The sin of the world away,
Have mercy upon us.”

Adelaide Anne Procter (1825–1864) English poet and songwriter

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 110.

“Tonight our bed is cold;
I'm lost in the darkness of our love.
God have mercy on the man
Who doubts what he's sure of.”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Brilliant Disguise"
Song lyrics, Tunnel Of Love (1987)

“The foundational God-experience of Israel was the Exodus – the experience of God in the liberation of slaves. Israel also experienced God as the one who was active on its behalf in the decisive moments of its history. And the early Christians experienced God in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, who was done to death as a political criminal. For us Christians, the human person is the privileged locus of God-experience – we encounter God first of all in Jesus of Nazareth, and then in every man, woman and child.”

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

Kunnumpuram, K. (ed) (2006) Life in Abundance: Indian Christian Reflections on Spirituality. Mumbai: St Pauls
On Spirituality

“It is the glistening and softly spoken lie; the amiable fallacy; the patriotic lie of the historian, the provident lie of the politician, the zealous lie of the partisan, the merciful lie of the friend, and the careless lie of each man to himself, that cast that black mystery over humanity, through which we thank any man who pierces, as we would thank one who dug a well in a desert.”

John Ruskin book The Seven Lamps of Architecture

Source: The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), Chapter II: The Lamp of Truth, section 1.

“When Satan attempts to draw you to sin by presenting God as a God all made up of mercy, oh then reply, that though God's general mercy extend to all the works of his hand, yet his special mercy is confined to those who are divinely qualified, to those who love him and keep his commandments, to those who trust in him, that by hope hang upon him, and who fear him; and that you must be such a one here, or else you can never be happy hereafter; you must partake of his special mercy, or else eternally perish in everlasting misery, notwithstanding God's general mercy.”

Thomas Brooks (1608–1680) English Puritan

page 44
Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices, 1652

“We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Are gods more ruthless than mortals?
Have they no mercy for youth? no love for the souls who have loved them?”

Charles Kingsley (1819–1875) English clergyman, historian and novelist

Andromeda, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
Attributed

“If I am mad, it is mercy! May the gods pity the man who in his callousness can remain sane to the hideous end!”

H.P. Lovecraft book The Temple

Source: The Temple

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