Quotes about incarnation (182 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Wherever they found magnificent temples of the Hindus ever since the establishment of Sayyid Salar Mas'ud Ghazi's rule, the Muslim rulers in India built mosques, monasteries and inns, appointed mu'azzins, teachers, and store-stewards, spread Islam vigorously and vanquished the Kafirs. Likewise, they cleared up Faizabad and Avadh, too, from the filth of reprobation (infidelity), because it was a great centre of worship and capital of Rama's father. Where there stood the great temple (of Ramjanmasthan), there they built a big mosque, and where there was a small mandap (pavilion), there they erected a camp mosque (masjid-i-mukhtasar-i-qanati). The Janmasthan temple is the principal place of Rama's incarnation, adjacent to which is the Sita ki Rasoi. Hence, what a lofty mosque was built there by king Babar in AH 923 (AD 1528) under the patronage of Musa Ashiqan! The mosque is still known far and wide as the Sita ki Rasoi mosque. And that temple is extant by its side”

Babur (1483–1530) 1st Mughal Emperor

aur pahlu mein wah dair baqi hai
Hadiqah-i-Shuhadã by Mîrza Alî Jãn,, cited by Dr. Harsh Narain, "Rama-Janmabhumi Temple: Muslim Testimony", 1990, and quoted in Goel, S.R. Hindu Temples - What Happened to them.
Quotes from Muslim histories of early modern era

Teachers

“The sea is emotion incarnate. It loves, hates, and weeps. It defies all attempts to capture it with words and rejects all shackles. No matter what you say about it, there is always that which you can't.”

Christopher Paolini book Eragon

Source: Eragon

Love , Hate , Sea

“What does anti-Semitism have to do with socialism? I would put the question this way: What does the Jew have to do with socialism? Socialism has to do with labor. When did one ever see him working instead of plundering, stealing and living from the sweat of others? As socialists we are opponents of the Jews because we see in the Hebrews the incarnation of capitalism.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

1930s, Die verfluchten Hakenkreuzler. Etwas zum Nachdenken (1932)

Way , Question

“If the ideas of reincarnation were true, I would love to see the slave re-incarnated as the king.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Idea , Love

“Christ is the genius of love and as such the most diametric antipole to Jewry, which is the incarnation of hate. … Christ was the first anti-Jewish opponent of stature. … The Jew is the lie that became flesh. He nailed Christ to the cross, and thus for the first time in history nailed the eternal truth to the cross.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

Christus ist das Genie der Liebe, als solches der diametralste Gegenpol zum Judentum, das die Inkarnation des Hasses darstellt. … Christus ist der erste Judengegner von Format. … Der Jude ist die menschgewordene Lüge. In Christus hat er zum erstenmal vor der Geschichte die ewige Wahrheit ans Kreuz geschlagen.
Michael: a German fate in diary notes (1926)

Love , Hate , Truth , Lie

“Divine incarnations do not come to bring a new or exclusive religion, but to restore the One Religion of God-realization.
Many are the churches and temples founded in his name, often prosperous and powerful, but where is the communion that he stressed — actual contact with God? Jesus wants temples to be established in human souls, first and foremost; then established outwardly in physical places of worship. Instead, there are countless huge edifices with vast congregations being indoctrinated in churchianity, but few souls who are really in touch with Christ through deep prayer and meditation.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, (2004) by Yogananda

God , Religion , Soul , Christ

“I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica
Context: I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.

For Father , God , Christ

“God has fallen out of containment in religion and into human hearts—God is incarnating. Our whole unconscious is in an uproar from the God Who wants to know and to be known.”

C.G. Jung (1875–1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology

God , Religion , Heart

“Then he kissed her. At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

Flowers , Kiss

“You are more to me than any of them has any idea; you are the atmosphere of beauty through which I see life; you are the incarnation of all lovely things… I think of you day and night. ~ Letter to Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas”

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) Irish writer and poet

Love , Life , Beauty , Idea

“Age after age, history repeats itself when men and women, in their ignorance, limitations and pride, sit in judgment over the God-incarnated man who declares his Godhood, and condemn him for uttering the Truths they cannot understand. He is indifferent to abuse and persecution for, in his true compassion he understands, in his continual experience of Reality he knows, and in his infinite mercy he forgives.”

Meher Baba (1894–1969) Indian mystic

Meher Baba’s Call (1954)

Women , Men , God , Truth

“Animals are innocence incarnate. This horse is like an enormous child, and if one wanted to point out life's innocence face to face, one would have to typify, not a little child, but a horse.”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XIV - The Ruins

Life , Animals , Horse

“A legal thief, a bloodless murderer,
A fiend incarnate, a false usurer.”

Joseph Hall (1574–1656) British bishop

Virgidemarium (1598) IV.

Falseness

“I can say with truth that I have never, even in times of greatest preoccupation with carnal, worldly and egotistic pursuits, seriously doubted that our existence here is related in some mysterious way to a more comprehensive and lasting existence elsewhere; that somehow or other we belong to a larger scene than our earthly life provides, and to a wider reach of time than our earthly allotment of three score years and ten…It has never been possible for me to persuade myself that the universe could have been created, and we, homo sapiens, so-called, have, generation after generation, somehow made our appearance to sojourn briefly on our tiny earth, solely in order to mount the interminable soap opera, with the same characters and situations endlessly recurring, that we call history. It would be like building a great stadium for a display of tiddly-winks, or a vast opera house for a mouth-organ recital. There must, in other words, be another reason for our existence and that of the universe than just getting through the days of our life as best we may; some other destiny than merely using up such physical, intellectual and spiritual creativity as has been vouchsafed us. This, anyway, has been the strongly held conviction of the greatest artists, saints, philosophers and, until quite recent times, scientists, through the Christian centuries, who have all assumed that the New Testament promise of eternal life is valid, and that the great drama of the Incarnation which embodies it, is indeed the master drama of our existence. To suppose that these distinguished believers were all credulous fools whose folly and credulity in holding such beliefs has now been finally exposed, would seem to me to be untenable; and anyway I'd rather be wrong with Dante and Shakespeare and Milton, with Augustine of Hippo and Francis of Assisi, with Dr. Johnson, Blake and Dostoevsky, than right with Voltaire, Rousseau, Darwin, the Huxleys, Herbert Spencer, H. G. Wells and Bernard Shaw.”

Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990) English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist

Confessions of a Twentieth-Century Pilgrim (1988)

Life , Truth , Fools , Way

“Every form of catechesis would do well to attend to the “way of beauty” (via pulchritudinis). Proclaiming Christ means showing that to believe in and to follow him is not only something right and true, but also something beautiful, capable of filling life with new splendour and profound joy, even in the midst of difficulties. Every expression of true beauty can thus be acknowledged as a path leading to an encounter with the Lord Jesus. This has nothing to do with fostering an aesthetic relativism which would downplay the inseparable bond between truth, goodness and beauty, but rather a renewed esteem for beauty as a means of touching the human heart and enabling the truth and goodness of the Risen Christ to radiate within it. If, as Saint Augustine says, we love only that which is beautiful, the incarnate Son, as the revelation of infinite beauty, is supremely lovable and draws us to himself with bonds of love. So a formation in the via pulchritudinis ought to be part of our effort to pass on the faith. Each particular Church should encourage the use of the arts in evangelization, building on the treasures of the past but also drawing upon the wide variety of contemporary expressions so as to transmit the faith in a new “language of parables”. We must be bold enough to discover new signs and new symbols, new flesh to embody and communicate the word, and different forms of beauty which are valued in different cultural settings, including those unconventional modes of beauty which may mean little to the evangelizers, yet prove particularly attractive for others.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Section 167
2010s, 2013, Evangelii Gaudium · The Joy of the Gospel

Love , Life , Truth , Faith

“We and we alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures. Everything is done for the nation.... The Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

As quoted in I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years, 1942-1945, Victor Klemperer, Vol. 2 , Random House, Inc. (2001) p. 317. Goebbels’ “Our Socialism” editorial was written on April 30, 1944.
1940s

“Who is a liar, saith John, but he that denyeth that Jesus is the Christ? He is Antichrist that denyeth the Father & the Son. And we are authorized also to call him God: for the name of God is in him. Exod. 23.21. And we must believe also that by his incarnation of the Virgin he came in the flesh not in appearance only but really & truly, being in all things made like unto his brethren (Heb. 2 17) for which reason he is called also the son of man.”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Drafts on the history of the Church (Section 3). Yahuda Ms. 15.3, National Library of Israel, Jerusalem, Israel. 2006 Online Version at Newton Project http://www.newtonproject.sussex.ac.uk/view/texts/normalized/THEM00220

God , Appearance , Christ

“I do not see in religion the mystery of the incarnation so much as the mystery of the social order. It introduces into the thought of heaven an idea of equalization, which saves the rich from being massacred by the poor.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Often paraphrased as “Religion keeps the poor from killing the rich.”
Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Religion , Idea

“The teachings of the Zend Avesta are in accordance with the doctrinal principles contained in the Egyptian book of the dead, and contain the Christ-principle. The Illiad of Homer, the Hebrew Bible, the Germanic Edda and the Sibylline Books of the Romans contain the same Christ-principle. All these are sufficient in order to demonstrate that Christ is anterior to Jesus of Nazareth. Christ is not one individual alone. Christ is a cosmic principle that we must assimilate within our own physical, psychic, somatic and spiritual nature… Among the Persians, Christ is Ormuz, Ahura Mazda, terrible enemy of Ahriman (Satan), which we carry within us. Amongst the Hindus, Krishna is Christ; thus, the gospel of Krishna is very similar to that of Jesus of Nazareth. Among the Egyptians, Christ is Osiris and whosoever incarnated him was in fact an Osirified One. Amongst the Chinese, the Cosmic Christ is Fu Hi, who composed the I-Ching (The Book of Laws) and who nominated Dragon Ministers. Among the Greeks, Christ is called Zeus, Jupiter, the Father of the Gods. Among the Aztecs, Christ is Quetzalcoatl, the Mexican Christ. In the Germanic Edda, Baldur is the Christ who was assassinated by Hodur, God of War, with an arrow made from a twig of mistletoe, etc. In like manner, we can cite the Cosmic Christ within thousands of ancient texts and old traditions which hail from millions of years before Jesus. The whole of this invites us to embrace that Christ is a cosmic principle contained within the essential principles of all religions.”

Samael Aun Weor book The Perfect Matrimony

The Perfect Matrimony

God , War , Books , Religion

“It seems to me that truth has taken its place again in our little room, and become incarnate; that the greatest bond which can bind two beings together is being confessed, the great bond we did not know of, though it is the whole of salvation:
"Before, I loved you for my own sake; to-day, I love you for yours."”

Henri Barbusse (1873–1935) French novelist

Light (1919), Ch. XXIII - Face To Face

Love , Truth

“The Son of God became incarnate to infuse into the human soul the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica
Context: The Son of [[God became incarnate to infuse into the human soul the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God]] The Son of God became incarnate to infuse into the human soul the feeling of brotherhood. All are brothers and all children of God. Abba, as he called the Father. I will show you the way, he said. Follow me and you will find the Father and you will all be his children and he will take delight in you. Agape, the love of each one of us for the other, from the closest to the furthest, is in fact the only way that Jesus has given us to find the way of salvation and of the Beatitudes.

God , Children , Feeling , Soul

“Remember it is essential to reach ever more of our folk with the message of racial survival. I wish you all the very best. You are dealing with pure, malignant evil, with devils incarnate. You will be targeted by the Federals, as their goal is your extinction. They will demonize you and your beliefs to deflect attention away from their own crimes. Go to the struggle with absolute defiance and accept what the Norns decree in likewise manner.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

page ?
Fanatacism Of Desperation

Evil

“Through art then, one finally establishes contact with reality: that is the great discovery. Here all is play and invention; there is no solid foothold from which to launch the projectiles which will pierce the miasma of folly, ignorance and greed. The world has not to be put in order: the world is order incarnate. It is for us to put ourselves in unison with this order, to know what is the world order in contradistinction to the wishful-thinking orders which we seek to impose on one another. The power which we long to possess, in order to establish the good, the true and the beautiful, would prove to be, if we could have it, but the means of destroying one another. It is fortunate that we are powerless.”

Henry Miller (1891–1980) American novelist

Source: Miller, H. (1969). “Creation,” The Henry Miller Reader. New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation. p.33.

Beauty , Art , Thinking , Reality

“He knew that when he kissed this girl, and forever wed his unutterable visions to her perishable breath, his mind would never romp again like the mind of God. So he waited, listening for a moment longer to the tuning-fork that had been struck upon a star. Then he kissed her. At his lips’ touch she blossomed for him like a flower and the incarnation was complete.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

God , Wedding , Girl , Star

“God is willing to walk the earth again incarnate in us.”

Eugenia Price (1916–1996) American writer

Source: Early Will I Seek Thee

God

“By virtue of creation, and still more the incarnation, nothing here is profane for those who know how to see.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

The Divinisation of Our Activities, p. 66
The Divine Milieu (1960)

“Basically there can be no categories such as 'religious' art and 'secular' art, because all true art is incarnational, and therefore 'religious.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Art

“I took the life of the woman I was supposed to call mother in the process of being born… in order to become the world's strongest shinobi… an incarnation of sand was implanted inside of me…”

Masashi Kishimoto (1974) Japanese manga artist

Life , World

“There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

“When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

Source: [As attributed by Alastair Reid in, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]

Books

“Wine is like the incarnation--it is both divine and human”

Paul Tillich (1886–1965) German-American theologian and philosopher

Wine

“The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Beauty , Light , Change , Waiting

“The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he's as cunning as he is ferocious; once he's had a taste of flesh then nothing else will do.”

Angela Carter (1940–1992) English novelist

Wolf

“Is he a good boy? (Cherise)
No, Mom, he’s Satan incarnate. In fact, once it’s over, we’re going to get liquored up and tattooed, then find some cheap hos and have a good time with his trust fund. (Nick)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Infinity

Boy , Moms , Time , Tattoo

“We're being trained through our incarnations--trained to seek love, trained to seek light, trained to see the grace in suffering.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Love , Light , Suffering , Training

“Suffering is the sandpaper of our incarnation. It does its work of shaping us.”

Ram Dass (1931–2019) American contemporary spiritual teacher and the author of the 1971 book Be Here Now

Suffering

“Hinduism is like a great reservoir of water from which many streams take their rise and to which they again repair after passing through many strange and fair lands. It is a great, creative matrix giving birth to many beautiful and living forms. Itself a historical, it has given birth to many sects and branches with interesting, chequered histories. Paying sole allegiance to the Guide within seated in the cave of the heart, it has put forward from time to time many teachers and sages of incomparable power and vision, incarnating the very Gods above and within.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

On Hinduism (2000)

God , Beauty , History , Birth

“Early artists considered the human body, that forked radish, that defenseless starfish, a poor vehicle for the expression of energy, compared to the muscle-rippling bull and the streamlined antelope. Once more it was the Greeks, by their idealization of man, who turned the human body into an incarnation of energy, to us the most satisfying of all, for although it can never attain the uninhibited physical flow of the animal, its movements concern us more closely. Through art we can relive them in our own bodies, and achieve thereby that enhanced vitality which all thinkers on art, from Goethe to Berenson, have recognized as one of the chief sources of aesthetic pleasure.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1951), Ch. V: Energy

Pleasure , Art , Animals

“Our Lord Jesus evolved just as each of us has. He was human, very human in the beginning of His evolution, but (throughout his physical incarnations) He more strangely than anyone else, more quickly had the power of excellence, that supreme ability to surrender Himself and to give himself to that which is higher than anyone else that has evolved through the earth. So, it was because of this excellence, because of this unusual ability, that Jesus, or better our Lord Emmanuel the only begotten Son, it means in esoteric fact, that our Lord was the only one who had this quality to become the Christ Officiant for our planet.”

Flower A. Newhouse (1909–1994) American mystic

Lecture December 13, 1959 The Reality of the Christ Hierarchy
Christ

Christ

“Christianity is, above all other religions ever known, a religion of sacrifice. It is a religion founded on the greatest of all sacrifices, the sacrifice of the Incarnation, culminating in the sacrifice on Calvary.”

Arthur Penrhyn Stanley (1815–1881) English churchman, Dean of Westminster

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 133.

Religion

“You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you're afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you're like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

The Observer (p. 111)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

World , Sadness , Angels , Thinking

“Byron idealised and expressed that bitter spirit of discontent which has at the present moment taken a more material and tangible form. He is the incarnation of November. From time immemorial it has been an Englishman's privilege to grumble, and Byron gave picturesque language to the universal feeling.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Monthly Magazine

Feeling , Universe , Time

“If only people freed themselves from their beliefs in all kinds of Ormuzds, Brahmas, Sabbaoths, and their incarnation as Krishnas and Christs, from beliefs in Paradises and Hells, in reincarnations and resurrections, from belief in the interference of the Gods in the external affairs of the universe, and above all, if they freed themselves from belief in the infallibility of all the various Vedas, Bibles, Gospels, Tripitakas, Korans, and the like, and also freed themselves from blind belief in a variety of scientific teachings about infinitely small atoms and molecules and in all the infinitely great and infinitely remote worlds, their movements and origin, as well as from faith in the infallibility of the scientific law to which humanity is at present subjected: the historic law, the economic laws, the law of struggle and survival, and so on, — if people only freed themselves from this terrible accumulation of futile exercises of our lower capacities of mind and memory called the "Sciences", and from the innumerable divisions of all sorts of histories, anthropologies, homiletics, bacteriologics, jurisprudences, cosmographies, strategies — their name is legion — and freed themselves from all this harmful, stupefying ballast — the simple law of love, natural to man, accessible to all and solving all questions and perplexities, would of itself become clear and obligatory.”

Leo Tolstoy A Letter to a Hindu

Source: A Letter to a Hindu (1908), VI

Love , God , People , World

“It is the knowledge and experience of the Incarnation, the wisdom and warnings given by Jesus in the Gospels, and not least the Resurrection that in the final analysis are all that matters.”

Simon Conway Morris (1951) British palaeontologist

The Boyle lecture (2005)

Wisdom , Knowledge

“Through the incarnation God descended into nature in order to super-animate and take it back to him.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Mysticism of Science (1939)

God , Nature , Animals

“When it turned on the Jew, Christianity and European civilization turned on the incarnation — albeit an incarnation often wayward and unaware — of its own best hopes.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

"A Season in Hell".
In Bluebeard's Castle (1971)

Hope

“It's no criticism of Chomsky to say that his analysis is inconsistent with that of other individuals and factions who essentially think that 9/11 was a hoax. However, it is remarkable that he should write as if the mass of evidence against Bin Laden has never been presented or could not have been brought before a court. This form of 9/11 denial doesn't trouble to conceal an unstated but self-evident premise, which is that the United States richly deserved the assault on its citizens and its civil society. After all, as Chomsky phrases it so tellingly, our habit of "naming our murder weapons after victims of our crimes: Apache, Tomahawk … [is] as if the Luftwaffe were to call its fighter planes 'Jew' and 'Gypsy.' "… In short, we do not know who organized the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or any other related assaults, though it would be a credulous fool who swallowed the (unsupported) word of Osama Bin Laden that his group was the one responsible. An attempt to kidnap or murder an ex-president of the United States (and presumably, by extension, the sitting one) would be as legally justified as the hit on Abbottabad. And America is an incarnation of the Third Reich that doesn't even conceal its genocidal methods and aspirations. This is the sum total of what has been learned, by the guru of the left, in the last decade.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2010s, 2011

Fools , Thinking , Learning

“When all is said and done, science is about things and theology is about words. Things behave in the same way everywhere, but words do not. … Theology works in one culture alone. If you have not grown up in Polkinghorne's culture, where words such as "incarnation" and "trinity" have a profound meaning, you cannot share his vision.”

Freeman Dyson (1923) theoretical physicist and mathematician

The Scientist As Rebel (2006)

Way , Science

“I am incarnate—and we all may share this awareness, seeing that there is but one God and one identity—I am incarnate in the earth, in all the animate forms of the earth, and in my human form. My human form was created so that I might be consciously incarnate. Being consciously incarnate, I may be unrestricted in the expression of myself and in the fulfilment of my purposes according to my will.”

Martin Cecil, 7th Marquess of Exeter (1909–1988) Marquess of Exeter

Thus It Is, 1989, p. 151
As of a Trumpet, On Eagle's Wings, Thus It Is

God , Animals

“Prince Charming, prince of the mockers —
compared with him the foulest of sinners
is grace incarnate…”

Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966) Russian modernist poet

Poem without a Hero (1963)

“People who believe themselves to be the incarnation of good have a distorted view of the world.”

Tzvetan Todorov (1939–2017) Bulgarian historian, philosopher, structuralist literary critic, sociologist and essayist

Hope and Memory: Reflections on the Twentieth Century (2003)

People , World

“Neither of you have a need for children in your present personalities. You are almost finished with incarnations on the earth, so much so that the physical bodies will return completely and unfragmented upon your physical death. This is always the case in the final earth life. The physical property is left behind, no portion of it being carried on that plane through children.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 9, Page 46
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 1

Life , Death , Children , Personality

“The principal function of anti-Americanism has always been, and still is, to discredit liberalism by discrediting its supreme incarnation. To travesty the United States as a repressive, unjust, racist—almost fascist—society was a way of proclaiming: look what happens when liberalism is implemented!”

Jean-François Revel (1924–2006) French writer and philosopher

"Introduction" http://www.encounterbooks.com/books/anam/anam_intro.html
2000s, Anti-Americanism (2003)

Way

“The Senate needs to protect the interests of the American people and the world community, not provide political cover to President Bush. It's not enough to call Saddam Hussein evil incarnate.”

Carl Romanelli (1959) American artist

on U.S. Senate hearings into President Bush's planned invasion of Iraq
[August 7, 2002, http://www.gp.org/press/pr_08_07_02.html, Press release: "Green Party Calls Senate Hearings on Iraq a 'Sham'", U.S Green Party, 2006-08-17]

People , World , Communication , Evil

“I don’t expect any conservatives to recognize the truth of Obama’s fundamental conservatism for at least a couple of decades—perhaps only after a real progressive presidency. In any case, today they are too invested in painting him as the devil incarnate in order to frighten grassroots Republicans into voting to keep Obama from confiscating all their guns, throwing them into FEMA re-education camps, and other nonsense that is believed by many Republicans. But just as they eventually came to appreciate Bill Clinton’s core conservatism, Republicans will someday see that Obama was no less conservative.”

Bruce Bartlett (1951) American historian

2010s, Obama is a Republican (2014)

Truth , Education , Painting

“b>One of the loveliest and most magnificent events that can happen in the country is when ponies take fright, particularly in a herd. A meadow-pippit has flown past. The ponies' fear is at first blended with play, even with mockery, amusement touched with a shudder, not unlike the behavior of the mentally ill. They trot as if they were retreating from a slow-moving stream of fire, but with lightning in every action, storm in every nerve; swinging their heads everywhere as if the front of their necks were made of elastic, gracefully flirting their tails. They can even pause for a moment, and start biting and boxing, with those romantic mating cries of theirs. Then all at once it is as if the fire has started flowing right under these strange creatures, they charge away like a storm incarnate over scree and bogs and landslides, dipping the tips of their toes for a fractional moment into the furnace that blazes beneath their hooves, cutting across waterfalls, gullys, and boulders, galloping steeply for a while until they stand trapped at last on some ledge high in the mountaintops, there to die and be eaten by birds.”

Halldór Laxness book The Atom Station

Atómstöðin (The Atom Station) (1948)

Fear , Behavior , Bird , Past

“The idea that humans form pair bonds, and that males often invest in their young, has a long history in biological anthropology. Early incarnations of the idea were criticized for painting an overly simplistic picture, according to which “Man the Hunter” provisioned his dependent wife and children with meat in a stable nuclear family, suspiciously reminiscent of a 1950s-style Western family. However, with appropriate amendments and qualifications, the idea that pair bonding and biparental care are a central part of our evolutionary endowment appears to be viable.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 145

Children , Family , History , Idea

“As far as “plot” goes, as I get older I more and more suspect that “plot” is really being used, in the many incarnations of this argument, as a placeholder for a whole cloud of qualities found (or not found) in certain narratives, some of which actually constitute “plot” and many of which do not. What first led me to suspect this is the fact that many of the sternest exponents of “I want novels to have plots, dammit” are also demonstrably fans of, for instance, quite a few Robert A. Heinlein novels whose plots can barely be detected even by advanced scientific equipment. (Not just later Heinlein, either; go back and look at Beyond This Horizon). As it happens, I like some of those books, too, and what I learn from them, and from thousands of other books, is that what matters isn’t the presence of a carefully-engineered, structurally sound “plot.” What matters is whether a book entrances us into reading it or forces us to decode it — and “plot” is just one of several methods of getting us into the reading trance. It’s a good method. It’s not the only one.”

Patrick Nielsen Hayden (1959) American science fiction editor, fanzine publisher, essayist, reviewer, anthologist, and teacher

"Oh No Lev Grossman No", in Making Light (30 August 2009)

Books , Learning , Reading

“He said the wicked know that if the ill they do be of sufficient horror men will not speak against it. That men have just enough stomach for small evils and only these will they oppose. He said that true evil has power to sober the smalldoer against his own deeds and in the contemplation of that evil he may even find the path of righteousness which has been foreign to his feet and may have no power but to go upon it. Even this man may be appalled at what is revealed to him and seek some order to stand against it. Yet in all of this there are two things which perhaps he will not know. He will not know that while the order which the righteous seek is never righteousness itself but is only order, the disorder of evil is in fact the thing itself. Nor will he know that while the righteous are hampered at every turn by their ignorance of evil to the evil all is plain, light and dark alike. This man of which we speak will seek to impose order and lineage upon things which rightly have none. He will call upon the world itself to testify as to the truth of what are in fact but his desires. In his final incarnation he may seek to indemnify his words with blood for by now he will have discovered that words pale and lose their savor while pain is always new.”

Cormac McCarthy book The Crossing

The Crossing (1994)

Men , Pain , Truth , World

“O my brothers, this is not a day of merry-making because the night of the 19th, at three o'clock, Guru Maharaj Ji [nt: Maharaji's father Hans Ji Maharaj] left his body. But I feel that Guru Maharaj Ji is alive and always will remain alive. So many times, Guru Maharaj Ji has come to this world. There have been many, many Perfect Masters and each one has revealed the very same Knowledge. You have not understood. Each Divine Incarnation has gone away and still you have not realized the Knowledge He brought. Now, if you want to know the Truth, then get that Supreme Knowledge soon, because this body will be destroyed one day. You have got to get Knowledge as soon as possible, otherwise the shop will be closed.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

July 29, 1966, Prem Nagar, India (translated from Hindi)
1960s

Truth , World , Feeling , Knowledge

“He who has ever been confronted with the ultimate and has realized that sun and stars and souls do not ramble in a vacuum will keep his heart in readiness for the hour when the world is entranced, awaits a soul to breathe in the mystery that all things exhale in their craving for salvation. For things are not mute. The stillness is full of demands. Out of the world comes a behest to instill into the air a rapturous song for God, to incarnate in the stones a message of humble beauty, and to instill a prayer for goodness in the hearts of all children.”

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

"The Holy Dimension", p. 330
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

God , Children , World , Beauty

“Life's drama of incarnation consists of one's eventual discovery of their inherent destiny. We are a creation of the Supreme Spirit in whose seed of divinity, Godhood, like the Godhood of Jesus, shall come into fruition.”

Flower A. Newhouse (1909–1994) American mystic

The drama of incarnation, 1948
Mysticism

Life

“Pure snow-water from the holy mountain,
Dew off the rare Naga Vajra grass.
These essences make a nectar
which is fermented by one
who is incarnated as a maiden.
Her cup's contents can protect you
from rebirth in a lower form,
if it is tasted in the state
of awareness it deserves.”

Tsangyang Gyatso, 6th Dalai Lama (1683–1706) sixth Dalai Lama of Tibet

Source: Attributed, Poems of Sadness: The Erotic Verse of the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso tr. Paul Williams 2004, p.70

Mountain , Grass , Water

“Through life’s dark road his sordid way he wends,
An incarnation of fat dividends.”

Charles Sprague (1791–1875) Boston businessman and poet

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

Life , Way

“The trouble with most Englishwomen is that they will dress as if they had been a mouse in a previous incarnation… they do not want to attract attention.”

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) British poet

As quoted in Edith Sitwell: Fire of the Mind : an Anthology (1976) by Elizabeth Salter, p. 176

“All texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, "the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us," is the most logocentric sentence ever written.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

1:154
"Quotes", Late Notebooks, 1982–1990: Architecture of the Spiritual World (2002)

“The Bible predicts that in the last days of man-made regimes on earth, a totally godless, anti-Christ world government will arise, led by a Devil-possessed dictator, Satan incarnate, who will bring a temporary false peace on earth and a counterfeit utopia. Its price will be enforced worship of him as the imitation Messiah. All of his subjects will be branded with a credit number in order to buy or sell or obtain food or employment, and all those who refuse to cooperate will be hunted, persecuted, and slaughtered by his commandment. This will be a time of Great Tribulation.
This anti-Christ government of anti-Christ forces under the leadership of the Antichrist himself, this superhuman world dictator of man's last one-world godless government, will then set up its headquarters in Jerusalem, his capital, and unite all peoples of the world into a one-world worship of this demon-demagogue and his magical image which can speak.
These startling events will immediately precede the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which is the major endtime event, the grand climax, as the Lord Himself returns and wipes out the Antichrist and his followers and sets up the last and most lasting and only perfect government the world has ever known, and "the meek shall inherit the earth"”

David Berg (1919–1994) Children of God founder

Psalm 37:11
A More Sure Word of Prophecy (2 Peter 1:19)

People , World , Peace , Food

“Pornography incarnates male supremacy. It is the DNA of male dominance. Every rule of sexual abuse, every nuance of sexual sadism, every highway and byway of sexual exploitation, is encoded in it.”

Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005) Feminist writer

Pornography, Men Possessing Women (1979)

“A psychiatrist today has the power to (1) take a fancy to a woman (2) lead her to take wild treatment as a joke (3) drug and shock her to temporary insanity (4) incarnate her (5) use her sexually (6) sterilize her to prevent conception (7) kill her by a brain operation to prevent disclosure. And all with no fear of reprisal. Yet it is rape and murder… We want at least one bad mark on every psychiatrist in England, a murder, an assault, or a rape or more than one… This is Project Psychiatry. We will remove them.”

L. Ron Hubbard (1911–1986) American science fiction author, philosopher, cult leader, and the founder of the Church of Scientology

Confidential memo "Project Psychiatry" (22 February 1966).

Fear

“The highest wisdom incarnated in the poorest body. And even in straw mixed with manure: the final substances in which, by a rare miracle, the origin and strength of life emerge anew. The circle closes.”

Antoni Tàpies (1923–2012) Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist

quote on using 'poor' materials, he used in his 'Arte Povera' works
1945 - 1970
Source: 'Res no és mesquí', La pràctica de l'art, Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona: Ariel, 1970; as quoted in: 'Tàpies: From Within', June ─ November, 2013 - Presse Release, Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya (MNAC ), p. 13, note 14

Life , Wisdom

“Dada is a farce, a legend, a state of myth. A badly behaved myth whose subterranean survival and capricious manifestation upset everyone... The aesthetic of absolute negativity has been changed into methodical doubt, thanks to which it will finally be able to incarnate new signs... After the NO and the ZERO, there is a third position for the myth; the anti-art gesture of Marcel Duchamp has been charged with positive energy. The Dada spirit identifies itself with a method of appropriation of exterior reality of the modern world... The ready-made is no longer the height of negativity or of polemic, but the basis element of a new expressive repertoire. Such is the New Realism: a direct means for getting one's feet back on the ground but at 40 degree above Dada zero.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: after 2000, Doubt and belief in painting' (2003), p. 41, note 30

World , Art , Reality , Change

“"You can say the Jesus Prayer from now till doomsday, but if you don't realize that the only thing that counts in the religious life is detachment, I don't see how you'll ever even move an inch. Detachment, buddy, and only detachment. Desirelessness. 'Cessation from all hankerings.' It's this business of desiring, if you want to know the goddam truth, that makes an actor in the first place. Why're you making me tell you things you already know? Somewhere along the line — in one damn incarnation or another, if you like — you not only had a hankering to be an actor or an actress but to be a good one. You're stuck with it now. You can't just walk out on the results of your own hankerings. Cause and effect, buddy, cause and effect. The only thing you can do now, the only religious thing you can do, is act. Act for God, if you want to — be God's actress, if you want to. What could be prettier? You can at least try to, if you want to — there's nothing wrong in trying." There was a slight pause. "You'd better get busy, though, buddy. The goddam sands run out on you every time you turn around. I know what I'm talking about. You're lucky if you get time to sneeze in this goddam phenomenal world."”

Jerome David Salinger book Franny and Zooey

Franny and Zooey (1961), Zooey (1957)

Life , God , Truth , World

“To follow Christ is also to identify ourselves with the poor and powerless as he did. The Incarnation is the symbol of this identification. Through his incarnation he inserted himself into the human family and became one with us. As Soares-Prabhu observes, “Jesus ‘declasses’ himself and adopts the life of an itinerant preacher without a home or means of subsistence.””

Kurien Kunnumpuram (1931–2018) Indian theologian

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

Life , Family , Home , Christ

“And yet this might not necessarily involve the conversion of the Trinity into a Quaternity. If… in Greek, spirit, instead of being neuter had been feminine, who can say that the Virgin Mary might not already have become an incarnation or humanization of the Holy Spirit? …And thus a dogmatic evolution would have been effected parallel to that of the divinization of Jesus, the Son, and his identification with the Word.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VIII : From God to God

“One individual may die for an idea, but that idea will, after his death, incarnate itself in a thousand lives.”

Subhas Chandra Bose (1897–1945) Indian nationalist leader and politician

"Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians" at Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html

Death , Idea

“That in these times every serious person should not in his heart have felt some difliculty with the doctrines of the incarnation, I cannot helieve. We are not as we were. When Christianity was first published, the imagination of mankind presented the relation of heaven to earth very differently from what it does now.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Letter X
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)

Imagination , Time , Heart , Personality

“The greatest problem all around the world today, whether in America, Japan, China, Russia, India or anywhere else in the world, is that people are not in peace. People want peace. Today, if two people fight, the government is supposed to settle them down. But when governments fight, who is going to settle them down? The only one who can settle the governments down is the Perfect Master, the incarnation of God Himself, who comes to Earth to save mankind.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Tokyo, Japan, October 3, 1972 (And it is Divine, July 1973)
1970s

God , People , World , Peace

“Virgin Birth, then, neither proves sinlessness, incarnation or divinity. We just do not know what divinity connotes, save that it implies a plus to his humanity, a plus which was both achieved and endowed.”

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.99

Birth

“In titling this work The Second Coming of Christ, I am not referring to a literal return of Jesus to earth. He came two thousand years ago and, after imparting a universal path to God's kingdom, was crucified and resurrected; his reappearance to the masses now is not necessary for the fulfillment of his teachings. What is necessary is for the cosmic wisdom and divine perception of Jesus to speak again through each one's own experience and understanding of the infinite Christ Consciousness that was incarnate in Jesus. That will be his true Second Coming.”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, (2004) by Yogananda

Wisdom , God , Understanding , Universe

“Other sages have spoken to me of God. But from whom could I have learned the essence of Divine perfection, as from Him, who was in a peculiar sense the Son, representative, and image of God — who was especially an incarnation of the unbounded love of the Father? And from what other teacher could I have learned to approach the Supreme Being with that filial spirit, which forms the happiness of my fellowship with Him? From other seers I might have heard of heaven; but when I behold in Jesus the spirit of heaven, dwelling actually on earth, what a new comprehension have I of that better world!”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 62

Love , God , World , Sense

“They have their belief, these poor Thibet people, that Providence sends down always an Incarnation of Himself into every generation. At bottom some belief in a kind of Pope! At bottom still better, belief that there is a Greatest Man; that he is discoverable; that, once discovered, we ought to treat him with an obedience which knows no bounds! This is the truth of Grand Lamaism; the "discoverability" is the only error here.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Heroes and Hero-Worship (1840), The Hero as Divinity

People , Truth , Error

“Each man in his life honors, and imitates as well as he can, that god to whose choir he belonged, while he is uncorrupted in his first incarnation here; and in the fashion he has thus learned, he bears himself to his beloved as well as to the rest. So, then, each chooses from among the beautiful a love conforming to his kind, and then, as if his chosen were his god, he sets him up and robes him for worship.”

Mary Renault book The Charioteer

Phaedrus by Plato, as translated in the novel, p. 104
The Charioteer (1953)

Love , Life , God , Beauty

“One is not a single self, although there is some common thread holding together disparate incarnations.”

Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist

The Loom of Time (2016)

“He was a versatile scholar who knew several languages, kept the company of learned Brahmins and composed excellent poetry on varied themes. He had been fascinated by the Puranic story of Goddess Durga particularly in her incarnation as Mahisamardini. He performed an elaborate Yajna presided over by pundits of the ancient lore and invoked the Devi for the protection of dharma. The Devi came to him in the shape of the sword which he now asked some of his followers to pick up and ply against bigotry and oppression…. Soon it became a hallowed tradition in many Hindu families, Sikh as well as non-Sikh, to dedicate their eldest sons to the Khalsa which rightly came to be regarded as the sword-arm of Hindu society.”

Guru Govind Singh (1666–1708) The tenth and last human Guru of Sikhism

Swarup, Ram, & Goel, S. R. (1985). Hindu-Sikh relationship. (Introduction by S.R. Goel)

Family , Learning

“Here one cries sudden on a sobbing breath,
Gripped in the clutch of some incarnate fear
What terror through the darkness draweth near?
What memory of carnage and ofdeath
What vanished scenes of dread to his closed eyes appear?”

Eva Dobell (1876–1963) British poet

Unsourced, Night Duty

Fear , Appearance , Memory

“… without New Testament Greek there would be no Christian Theology, or possibly no Christianity. The Athanasian Creed, the dogma of Christ the Homiousios, of the same essence as the Father, the dogma of Christ, fully God and Fully Human, The dogma of the Holy Trinity, 'that Christ is the incarnation of the indivisible source of the Divine Godhead through the power of the Holy Spirit " could only have been formulated by the Church Fathers within the linguistic structures and concepts provided by early century Greek language and thought., e. g concepts such as the God/man, a concept that which does not exist in the Hebrew and is totally foreign to Hebrew culture. Hence Shelley's assertion that the Greeks /the Hellenes "gave us our religion."”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On Orthodoxia
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

God , Religion , Christ

“She has a fascination with Mayan prophecies, and she's writing a book that's sort of her remembrance of her past incarnation. Whatever she applies herself to, she makes it this beautiful, glorious world around her. All of us kids have always been artistic because of her influence.”

Brandon Boyd (1976) American rock singer, writer and visual artist

on his mom, Dolly Wiseman. Spin (October 2001)

Books , World , Beauty , Past

“Aurangzeb's purpose in building those three mosques was the same intentionally offensive political purpose that moved the Russians to build their Orthodox cathedral in the city-centre at Warsaw. Those mosques were intended to signify that an Islamic government was reigning supreme, even over Hinduism's holiest of holy places. I must say that Aurangzeb had a veritable genius for picking out provocative sites. Aurangzeb and Philip II of Spain are a pair. They are incarnations of the gloomily fanatical vein in the Christian - Muslim - Jewish family of religions. Aurangzeb - poor wretched misguided bad man - spent a lifetime of hard labour in raising massive monuments to his own discredit. Perhaps the Poles were really kinder in destroying the Russians' self-discrediting monument in Warsaw than you have been in sparing Aurangzeb's mosques.”

Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975) British historian, author of A Study of History

Arnold J. Toynbee in 'One World and India' (New Delhi, 1960) pp. 59-60

Family , Religion

“The most destructive criticism has not been able to dethrone Christ as the incarnation of perfect holiness. The waves of a tossing and restless sea of unbelief break at His feet, and He stands still the supreme model, the inspiration of great souls, the rest of the weary, the fragrance of all Christendom, the one divine flower in the garden of God.”

Herrick Johnson (1832–1913) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 57.

God , Soul , Flowers , Christ

“The theatre was full — crammed to its roof: royal and noble were there; palace and hotel had emptied their inmates into those tiers so thronged and so hushed. Deeply did I feel myself privileged in having a place before that stage; I longed to see a being of whose powers I had heard reports which made me conceive peculiar anticipations. I wondered if she would justify her renown: with strange curiosity, with feelings severe and austere, yet of riveted interest, I waited. She was a study of such nature as had not encountered my eyes yet: a great and new planet she was: but in what shape? I waited her rising.She rose at nine that December night: above the horizon I saw her come. She could shine yet with pale grandeur and steady might; but that star verged already on its judgment-day. Seen near, it was a chaos — hollow, half-consumed: an orb perished or perishing — half lava, half glow.I had heard this woman termed "plain," and I expected bony harshness and grimness — something large, angular, sallow. What I saw was the shadow of a royal Vashti: a queen, fair as the day once, turned pale now like twilight, and wasted like wax in flame.For awhile — a long while — I thought it was only a woman, though an unique woman, who moved in might and grace before this multitude. By-and-by I recognized my mistake. Behold! I found upon her something neither of woman nor of man: in each of her eyes sat a devil. These evil forces bore her through the tragedy, kept up her feeble strength — for she was but a frail creature; and as the action rose and the stir deepened, how wildly they shook her with their passions of the pit! They wrote HELL on her straight, haughty brow. They tuned her voice to the note of torment. They writhed her regal face to a demoniac mask. Hate and Murder and Madness incarnate she stood.It was a marvellous sight: a mighty revelation.It was a spectacle low, horrible, immoral.Swordsmen thrust through, and dying in their blood on the arena sand; bulls goring horses disembowelled, made a meeker vision for the public — a milder condiment for a people's palate — than Vashti torn by seven devils: devils which cried sore and rent the tenement they haunted, but still refused to be exorcised.Suffering had struck that stage empress; and she stood before her audience neither yielding to, nor enduring, nor in finite measure, resenting it: she stood locked in struggle, rigid in resistance. She stood, not dressed, but draped in pale antique folds, long and regular like sculpture. A background and entourage and flooring of deepest crimson threw her out, white like alabaster — like silver: rather, be it said, like Death.”

Charlotte Brontë book Villette

Source: Villette (1853), Ch. XXIII: Vashi

Death , Hate , People , Feeling

“Still not satisfied that a qualified prince had been born to the dynasty, Satyavati prevailed upon her son to try a third time. It was again the turn of the first princess, but she aghast at the prospect of another encounter with Vyasa, sent to him as her substitute, a servant woman. Vyasa and this servant woman both substitutes, conceived Vidura, who became the wise counselor to the Kaurava court, said to be incarnation of the god Dharma.”

Vyasa central and revered figure in most Hindu traditions

In p. 58
Sources, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kr̥ṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata

God , Time , Princess

““People always talk about human sacrifice as if it were an unusual and aberrant activity,” she said thoughtfully. “Over the centuries, it’s really been fairly common in a number of societies. Think about it. There’re a number of religions in the United States whose worship centers on a particular human sacrifice.” She glanced at me.
“Jesus Christ on the cross,” I said slowly.
“Certainly. Thousands of people consume Christ’s body and blood each Sunday.”
“That’s different.”
She shrugged. “Not really. Christ died long ago in a faraway place, and that might make it seem different. His worshipers claimed he was God incarnate, but the Aztecs claimed the same for the god-king they sacrificed. It happened only once, and that speaks for moderation on the part of the Christians, but that’s not a fundamental difference, just one of degree.””

Pat Murphy book The Falling Woman

Source: The Falling Woman (1986), Chapter 10 (p. 131)

God , People , Religion , Thinking

“Spirits incarnate themselves as men or as women, because they are of no sex and, as it is necessary for them to develop themselves in every direction, both sexes, as well as every variety of social position. furnish them with special trials and duties, and with the opportunity of acquiring experience. A spirit who had always incarnated itself as a man would be only known by men, and vice versa.”

Allan Kardec (1804–1869) systematizer of Spiritism

Source: The Spirits' Book, p. 131.

Women , Men , Sex

“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.

Love , Life , God , Faith

“Wisely watch for the sight
Of the supernova burgeoning over the barn,
Lampshine blurred in the steam of beasts, the spirit's right
Oasis, light incarnate.”

Richard Wilbur (1921–2017) American poet

A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness

Light

“The cross is the centre of the world's history; the incarnation of Christ and the crucifixion of our Lord are the pivot round which all the events of the ages revolve. The testimony of Christ was the spirit of prophecy, and the growing power of Jesus is the spirit of history.”

Alexander Maclaren (1826–1910) British minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 171.

Age , World , History , Christ

“Since it is hardly likely that contemporary critics seriously mean to bar prose narratives that are unrealistic from the domain of literature, one suspects that a special standard is being applied to sexual themes. … There is nothing conclusive in the well-known fact that most men and women fall short of the sexual prowess that people in pornography are represented as enjoying; that the size of organs, number and duration of orgasms, variety and feasibility of sexual powers, and amount of sexual energy all seem grossly exaggerated. Yes, and the spaceships and the teeming planets depicted in science-fiction novels don’t exist either. The fact that the site of narrative is an ideal topos disqualifies neither pornography or science-fiction from being literature. … The materials of the pornographic books that count as literature are, precisely, one of the extreme forms of human consciousness. Undoubtedly, many people would agree that the sexually obsessed consciousness can, in principle, enter into literature as an art form. … But then they usually add a rider to the agreement which effectively nullifies it. They require that the author have the proper “distance” from his obsessions for their rendering to count as literature. Such a standard is sheer hypocrisy, revealing one again that the values commonly applied to pornography are, in the end, those belonging to psychiatry and social affairs rather than to art. (Since Christianity upped that ante and concentrated on sexual behavior as the root of virtue, everything pertaining to sex has been a “special case” in our culture, evoking particularly inconsistent attitudes.) Van Gogh’s paintings retain their status as art even if it seems his manner of painting owed less to a conscious choice of representational means than to his being deranged and actually seeing reality the way he painted it. … What makes a work of pornography part of the history of art rather than of trash is not distance, the superimposition of a consciousness more conformable to that of ordinary reality upon the “deranged consciousness” of the erotically obsessed. Rather, it is the originality, thoroughness, authenticity, and power of that deranged consciousness itself, as incarnated in a work.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” pp. 45-47
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Women , Men , People , Books

“The purpose and cause of the incarnation was that He might illuminate the world by His wisdom and excite it to the love of Himself.”

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) French scholastic philosopher, theologian and preeminent logician

As quoted in "The Abelardian Doctrine Of The Atonement" (1892), published in Doctrine and Development : University Sermons (1898) by Hastings Rashdall, p. 138

Love , Wisdom , World

“He, without voice and opening of lips, formed in my soul these words: Herewith is the Fiend overcome. These words said our Lord, meaning His blessed Passion as He shewed it afore.
On this shewed our Lord that the Passion of Him is the overcoming of the Fiend. God shewed that the Fiend hath now the same malice that he had afore the Incarnation. And as sore he travaileth, and as continually he seeth that all souls of salvation escape him, worshipfully, by the virtue of Christ’s precious Passion. And that is his sorrow, and full evil is he ashamed: for all that God suffereth him to do turneth us to joy and him to shame and woe. And he hath as much sorrow when God giveth him leave to work, as when he worketh not: and that is for that he may never do as ill as he would: for his might is all taken into God’s hand.”

Julian of Norwich (1342–1416) English theologian and anchoress

The Fifth Revelation, Chapter 13

God , Soul , Passion , Evil

“I think that the trivialness of life is, and personally to each one, ought to be seen to be, done away with by the Incarnation.”

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) English poet

Letter to E.H. Coleridge (22 January 1866)
Letters, etc

Life , Thinking , Personality