“Thus each successive epoch of theology found its own thoughts in Jesus; that was, indeed, the only way in which it could make Him live. But it was not only each epoch that found its reflection in Jesus; each individual created Him in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man's true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.”

— Albert Schweitzer , book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 4

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Albert Schweitzer 126

French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosoph… 1875–1965

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“The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma. The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Savior. It loosed the bands by which He had been riveted for centuries to the stony rocks of ecclesiastical doctrine, and rejoiced to see life and movement coming into the figure once more, and the historical Jesus advancing, as it seemed, to meet it. But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own. What surprised and dismayed the theology of the last forty years was that, despite all forced and arbitrary interpretations, it could not keep Him in our time, but had to let Him go. He returned to his own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.”

Albert Schweitzer book The Quest of the Historical Jesus

Source: The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), p. 397

“Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age, — at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.”

Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) French writer

Pierre l'Ermite, Calvin et Robespierre, chacun à trois cents ans de distance, ces trois Picards ont été, politiquement parlant, des leviers d'Archimède.C'était à chaque époque une pensée qui recontrait un point d'appel dans les intérêts et chez les hommes.
Source: About Catherine de' Medici (1842), Part I: The Calvinist Martyr, Ch. XIII: Calvin.

“Each thing in its way, when true to its own character, is equally beautiful.”

Edward Abbey book Desert Solitaire

"Cliffrose and Bayonets", p. 37
Source: Desert Solitaire (1968)

“Contrast Pilate with the prisoner before him, Jesus. Pilate was deeply concerned with position and power. Jesus cared for none of these things. Which was the richer in all that makes a great personality and true success in life?”

Halford E. Luccock (1885–1960) American Methodist minister

"Dire Poverty", in Unfinished Business : Short Diversions On Religious Themes (1956)
Context: !-- Three contrasts will lead us into the theme, by giving concrete proof of the truth which Kipling declared. --> Contrast Pilate with the prisoner before him, Jesus. Pilate was deeply concerned with position and power. Jesus cared for none of these things. Which was the richer in all that makes a great personality and true success in life? Contrast Nero, the Roman Emperor, and the prisoner named Paul who was beheaded in Nero's reign. Who was the real pauper, Nero or Paul? <!-- Drop down to the nineteenth century. Beyond question the two most notable figures in the history of Africa in the nineteenth century were Cecil Rhodes and David Livingstone. Rhodes amassed millions exploiting South Africa, with its gold and its diamonds. His desire to seize all of South Africa for the British Empire was one of the chief causes of the Boer War. Rhodes died worth many millions of dollars. The other figure was a missionary and explorer, Livingstone. He gave his life not only to bring the gospel of Christ to the black people of Central Africa, but also to fight against slavery and all the oppressions with which they were beset. He died with hardly a cent to his name. but his grave in Westminster Abbey is one of the great

“Thus the word reveals the Divine Essence; His incarnation makes that Life, that Love, that Light, which is eternally resident in God obvious to souls that steadily contemplate Himself. These terms Life, Love, Light — so abstract, so simple, so suggestive — meet in God; but they meet also in Jesus Christ. They do not only make Him the centre of a philosophy; they belong to the mystic language of faith more truly than to the abstract terminalogy of speculative thought. They draw hearts to Jesus; they invest Him with a higher than any intellectual beauty.”

Henry Liddon (1829–1890) British theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 91.

“Pretend that you are a writer of fiction, and you create a character. This character is so independent, alive and real, that it in turn forms other characters -- and each writes its own book, or forms its own reality. That is a truer picture of your position.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 511
The “Unknown” Reality: Volume Two, (1979)

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.”

Thomas Mann book The Magic Mountain

Source: The Magic Mountain (1924), Ch. 2, “At Tienappels’,” (1924), trans. by H.T. Lowe-Porter (1928).

“The world follows its own course. Each possesses his own thoughts, each treads his own path. So it is with your mother, and so it is with your starling. As it is with everyone. The world follows its own course.”

Haruki Murakami book The Strange Library

Source: The Strange Library

“The inner climate stamps each individual with its character. Every life-form has its own individual anomaly point of health, which makes the orderly reproduction of the species possible. This also explains why the world of parasites increases with fever.”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Implosion Magazine, No. 71, p. 12 (Callum Coats: Energy Evolution (2000))
Implosion Magazine

“We are not to evade, then, the eternity of free beings that is implied in any serious demand for freedom. If the souls of men are really free, they coexist with God in the eternity which God inhabits, and in the governing total of their self-active being they are of the same nature as he, — they too are self-put rational wholes of self-conscious life. As complete reason is his essence, so is reason their essence—their nature in the large—whatever may be the varying conditions under which their selfhood, the required peculiarity of each, may bring it to appear. Each of them has its own ideal of its own being, namely, its own way of fulfilling the character of God; and its self-determining life is just the free pursuit of this ideal, despite all the opposing conditions by which it in part defines its life. Moreover, since this ideal, seen eternally in God, is the chosen goal of every consciousness, it is the final — not the efficient—cause of the whole existing self. All the being of each self has thus the form of a self-supplying, self-operating life; or, in the phraseology of the Schoolmen and Spinoza, each is causa sui. This is what its "eternity" exactly means.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Harmony of Determinism and Freedom, p.338-9

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