“No one who ever wants praise will be satisfied with praise, the person who wants love cannot be satisfied with love. No want is ever fulfilled. And therefore I still don't know whether it is better to fear God and keep His commandments or to curse God and die.”
God Knows (1984)
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Joseph Heller 132
American author 1923–1999Related quotes
“I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.”
Man Is Not Alone : A Philosophy Of Religion (1951), Ch. 24 : The Great Yearning; The Yearning for Spiritual Living<!-- p. 259 -->
Context: He who is satisfied has never truly craved, and he who craves for the light of God neglects his ease for ardor, his life for love, knowing that contentment is the shadow not the light. The great yearning that sweeps eternity is a yearning to praise, a yearning to serve. And when the waves of that yearning swell in our souls all the barriers are pushed aside: the crust of callousness, the hysteria of vanity, the orgies of arrogance. For it is not the I that trembles alone, it is not a stir out of my soul but an eternal flutter that sweeps us all. No code, no law, even the law of God, can set a pattern for all of our living. It is not enough to have the right ideas. For the will, not reason, has the executive power in the realm of living. The will is stronger than reason and does not blindly submit to the dictates of rational principles. Reason may force the mind to accept intellectually its conclusions. Yet what is the power that will make me love to do what I ought to do?
Source: The Sayings and Teachings of the Great Mystics of Islam (2004), p. 270
“I don't want 'constructive criticism'. I want praise.”
Cited in Times Literary Supplement, 6 March 2009.
“I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever.”
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), III : The Hunger of Immortality
Context: Glorious is the risk! — καλος γαρ ο κινδυνος, glorious is the risk that we are able to run of our souls never dying … Faced with this risk, I am presented with arguments designed to eliminate it, arguments demonstrating the absurdity of the belief in the immortality of the soul; but these arguments fail to make any impression on me, for they are reasons and nothing more than reasons, and it is not with reasons that the heart is appeased. I do not want to die — no; I neither want to die nor do I want to want to die; I want to live for ever and ever and ever. I want this "I" to live — this poor "I" that I am and that I feel myself to be here and now, and therefore the problem of the duration of my soul, of my own soul, tortures me.
“No one ever perfectly loved God who did not perfectly love some of his creatures in this world.”
Second Day, Novel XIX (trans. W. K. Kelly)
Variant translation by Samuel Putnam in Marguerite of Navarre (1935), p. 53:
Never shall a man attain to the perfect love of God who has not loved to perfection some creature in this world.
L'Heptaméron (1558)
Wesley quoting his own sermon on "The Circumcision of the Heart" (1 January 1733) in the work A Plain Account Of Christian Perfection (Edition of 1777)
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