I cannot make my kids obey. But I can control my responses to their disobedience—that is, I can respect their choices and provide wise consequences for their actions, so they can learn just as much about wisdom from disobeying as from obeying. And I can respond in ways that create an environment in which their poor choices are their problem.
Most of [the alchemists] were poor; many all but unknown in their own time, many died and saw no fruit of their labours… Of some the very names are forgotten. But though their names be dead, their works live, and grow and spread over ever fresh generations of youth, showing them fresh steps towards that temple of wisdom which is the knowledge of things as they are.
On a trip to Russia I bought one of those Matryoshka “nested dolls” that break apart at the waist to reveal smaller and smaller dolls inside…it occurred to me to me later that each of us, like the nested dolls, contains multiple selves, making us a mysterious combination of good and evil, wisdom and folly, reason and instinct… (pp.80)
Working rightly, the brain is the highest form of "instinctual wisdom." Thus it should work like the homing instinct of pigeons and the formation of the foetus in the womb - without verbalizing the process of knowing "how" it does it. The self-conscious brain, like the self-conscious heart, is a disorder, and manifests itself in the acute feeling of separation between "I" and my experience.
Suspending moral judgement is not the immorality of the novel; it is its morality. The morality that stands against the ineradicable human habit of judging instantly, ceaselessly, and everyone; of judging before, and in the absence of, understanding. From the viewpoint of the novel's wisdom, that fervid readiness to judge is the most detestable stupidity. Not that the novelist utterly denies that moral judgement is legitimate, but that she refuses it a place in the novel.
God is Infinite Wisdom, and Power, and Goodness - and LOVE; but if this idea is too vast for your human faculties - if your mind loses itself in its overwhelming infinitude, fix it on Him who condescended to take our nature upon Him, who was raised to Heaven even in His glorified human body, in whom the fulness of the Godhead shines.
If your situtation is the fault of anything or anyone else...there is very little hope and absolutely zero power over your own life."Responsibility is about hope and control. And...who doesn't want hope for a greater future that their choices control? ...Most folks look for their car keys with more energy than they search for the wisdom that can change their lives.
We Americans have many grave problems to solve, many threatening evils to fight, and many deeds to do, if, as we hope and believe, we have the wisdom, the strength, and the courage and the virtue to do them. But we must face facts as they are. We must neither surrender ourselves to a foolish optimism, nor succumb to a timid and ignoble pessimism.
God can be everywhere at once, heeding the prayers of all who call out in the name of Christ; performing the mighty miracles that keep the stars in their places, and the plants bursting up through the earth, and the fish swimming in the sea. There is no limit to God. There is no limit to His wisdom. There is no limit to His power. There is no limit to His love. There is no limit to His mercy.
Everything in this world seems to be created in pairs. If there is a man, there is a woman—in almost equal numbers. In the same way, there is pleasure with pain, love with hatred, wisdom with ignorance, passion with repulsion, ecstasy with depression, and so on. The world seems to have been divided into two attributes—good and evil. Even God seems to be divided--God Himself and His counterpart—the Devil.