Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the Soul.
Nicolas MalebrancheRead
You will not dishonor the divine perfections by judgments unworthy of them, provided you never judge of Him by yourself, provided you do not ascribe to the Creator the imperfections and limitations of created beings.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that one should not judge the divine based on human imperfections and limitations.
In this quote, Nicolas Malebranche emphasizes the importance of perceiving divine perfection without projecting human flaws onto it. He warns against evaluating the Creator through the lens of human experiences and shortcomings, promoting an understanding that the divine operates beyond human comprehension and limitation.
In practice
In a philosophical discussion about the nature of God and human perception, this quote can highlight the distinction between human and divine qualities.
Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the Soul.
Our soul is not united to our body in the ordinary sense of these terms. It is immediately and directly united to God alone.
As our bodies live upon the earth and find sustenance in the fruits which it produces, so our minds feed on the same truths as the intelligible and immutable substance of the divine Word contains.
Just as our eyes need light in order to see, our minds need ideas in order to create.
Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: 'What kind of person am I going to be?' It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That's all it is.
If we take the poor away from the Gospel, we won't be able to understand the whole message of Jesus Christ.
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.
Woodcutter. Cut my shadow from me. Free me from the torment of being without fruit. Why was I born among mirrors? Day goes round and round me. The night copies me in all its stars. I want to live without my reflection. And then let me dream that ants and thistledown are my leaves and my parrots.
Translation rewrites a foreign text in terms that are intelligible and interesting to readers in the receiving culture. Doing so is akin to committing an act of ethnocentric violence by uprooting the text from the language and culture that gave it life. Translating into current, standard English at once conceals that violence and homogenizes foreign cultures.
What is truth? A difficult question; but I have solved it for myself by saying that it is what the 'voice within' tells you.
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