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Beware of solipsism. Don't ever think you are the center of the world. Be very careful of assuming that you are the object of a divine design. That there's something special just about being you. That that's all you have to prove - that, why wouldn't a person such as yourself have God on their side; Why wouldn't it be - 'of course God would care who I slept with, what I ate, what holy day I observed, why would He not? Surely that's why the heavens are arranged in the starry beauty and array in the form they take.' -- You are forced to wonder, if maybe - even though it's a less beautiful thought - it could be that the galaxies are not arranged with you in mind.
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Christopher Hitchens vs Douglas Wilson

 

Christopher Hitchens

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—You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn't that so?
— And then?
—That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing, a definitely constituted entity. You see?
— Let us turn back, said Cranly.

 

James Joyce

 

I have often thought had there been somebody like me around, something might have been able to be done. I also think I don't see how I could have done what I've done in the world had I been married. And when I decided-because I've been on the verge of marriage many times-I said no, because if I wanted to roam the globe like I did, it wouldn't be fair. It wouldn't be fair to me, it wouldn't be fair to the people. At the point, I really feel it was a kind of destiny because I've been able to get to places. There are some people in the world who have other jobs to do.

 

Virginia Satir

 

People canvass up and down the value and utility of Christianity, and none of them seem to see that it was the common channel towards which all the great streams of thought in the old world were tending, and that in some form or other when they came to unite it must have been. That it crystallized round a particular person may have been an accident; but in its essence, as soon as the widening intercourse of the nations forced the Jewish mind into contact with the Indian and the Persian and the Grecian, such a religion was absolutely inevitable.
It was the development of Judaism in being the fulfilment of the sacrificial theory, and the last and purest conception of a personal God lying close above the world, watching, guiding, directing, interfering. Its object was no longer the narrow one of the temporal interests of a small people. The chrysalis had burst its shell, and the presiding care extended to all mankind, caring not now for bodies only but for souls. It was the development of Parsism in settling finally the vast question of the double principle, the position of the evil spirit, his history, and the method of his defeat; while Zoroaster's doctrine of a future state was now for the first time explained and justified; and his invisible world of angels and spirits, and the hierarchies of the seven heavens, were brought in subjection to the same one God of the Jews.

 

James Anthony Froude

 

He who cannot see the workings of a Divine wisdom in the order of the heavens, the change of the seasons, the flowing of the tides, the operations of the wind and other elements, the structure of the human body, the circulation of the blood through a variety of vessels wonderfully arranged and conducted, the instinct of beasts, their tempers and dispositions, the growth of plants, and their many effects for meat and medicine; he who cannot see all these and many other things as the evident contrivance of a Divine wisdom is sottishly blind, and unworthy the name of man.

 

William (ecclesiastic) Jones