Best 112 quotes in «providence quotes» category

He reminded me of the typical soap-opera star. His words were fake, his smile was fake, and his very presence affected me like nails on a chalkboard.

Her faith was too weak; the prayer too heavy to be thus uplifted. It fell back, a lump of lead, upon her heart. It smote her with the wretched conviction, that Providence intermeddled not in these petty wrongs of one individual to his fellow, nor had any balm for these little agonies of a solitary soul, but shed its justice, and its mercy, in a broad, sunlike sweep, over half the universe at once. Its vastness made it nothing. But Hepzibah did not see, that, just as there comes a warm sunbeam into every cottage-window, so comes a love-beam of God's care and pity, for every separate need.

History is God's providence in human affairs.

I do believe in Providence. There have been far too many tiny perfect coincidences in my life. At some point, they cease to be coincidences.

In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel, because they are dependent upon one another. So when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day or this week.

In a clock, stop but one wheel and you stop every wheel, because they are dependent upon one other. So when God has ordered a thing for the present to be thus and thus, how do you know how many things depend upon this thing? God may have some work to do twenty years hence that depends on this passage of providence that falls out this day or this week.

It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining that we have not the right tools, but by using well the tools we have. What we are, and where we are is God's providential arrangement - God's doing, though it may be man's misdoing; and the manly and the wise way is to look your disadvantages in the face, and see what can be made our of them.

I don’t deny that it was more than a coincidence which made things turn out as they did, it was a whole train of coincidences. But what has providence to do with it? I don’t need any mystical explanation for the occurrence of the improbable; mathematics explains it adequately, as far as I’m concerned. Mathematically speaking, the probable (that in 6,000,000,000 throws with a regular six-sided die the one will come up approximately 1,000,000,000 times) and the improbable (that in six throws with the same die the one will come up six times) are not different in kind, but only in frequency, whereby the more frequent appears a priori more probable. But the occasional occurrence of the improbable does not imply the intervention of a higher power, something in the nature of a miracle, as the layman is so ready to assume. The term probability includes improbability at the extreme limits of probability, and when the improbable does occur this is no cause for surprise, bewilderment or mystification.

My dear Keats go on, don't despair, collect incidents, study characters, read Shakespeare and trust in Providence.

It was thus that in 1940 [Hitler] represented a wave of the future. His greatest reactionary opponent, Churchill, was like King Canute, attempting to withstand and sweep back that wave. And––yes, mirabile dictu—this King Canute succeeded: because of his resolution and—allow me to say this—because of God’s will, of which, like every human being, he was but an instrument. He was surely no saint, he was not a religious man, and he had many faults. Yet so it happened.

Often what you humans call chance is instead the workings of a deeper pattern, which the casual eye cannot easily perceive.

Nina, there has always been something about you that I couldn‟t shake. Even when I didn‟t want to love you, I was drawn to you. I couldn‟t think of anything else. Now you‟re my w ife, and you are carrying our child. There is nothing more beautiful than that. When you‟re sweaty and exhausted holding Bean, thenthat will be the most beautiful thing I‟ve ever seen. When I see tears fall from your eyes when we send Bean off to the firs t day of kindergarten… that will the most be the most beautiful thing I‟ve ever seen. When you comfort me each time we send our kids totraining; on every one of our anniversaries; and when you‟re hair turns gray. Every one of those moments will be the most beautiful thing I‟ve ever seen.

Once again was it proved that the designs of Providence are impenetrable and that the sinner, climbing out of the pit of his filthiness, may feel himself touched by grace.

Our safety is not in ourselves, nor in imperfect fellow-men; not in the church, nor in its office-bearers: it is in the Lord -- in that Lord who, on the night before his death, ordered all things aright for the battle of tomorrow: & let us not forget that he wakes while we sleep; that he is preparing rescue before we have seen the hazard; and that although evil should descend swift as the lightening, his arm can transcend its speed, and intercept its stroke. -- David King, 'The Lord's Supper.

Mark to yourself the gradual way in which you have been prepared for, and are now led by an irresistible necessity to enter upon your great labour.

Providence has relation essentially to man. It is for man's sake that Providence makes of things whatever it pleases; it is for man's sake that it supersedes the authority and reality of a law otherwise omnipotent. … [W]e nowhere read that God, for the sake of brutes, became a brute – the very idea of this is, in the eyes of religion, impious and ungodly; or that God ever performed a miracle for the sake of animals or plants. On the contrary, we read that a poor fig-tree, because it bore no fruit at a time when it could not bear it, was cursed, purely in order to give man an example of the power of faith over Nature[.]

... plunged into chance,--that is to say, swallowed up in Providence

Providence knows best.

Perhaps the cultural Christianity needs to become full-on no-excuses Christianity. You need light to fight the dark. It's the oldest story in the book.

Providence then - and this is what is most important to grasp - is not the same thing as a universal teleology. To believe in divine and unfailing providence is not to burden one's conscience with the need to see every event in this world not only as an occasion for God's grace, but as a positive determination of God's will whereby he brings to pass a comprehensive design that, in the absence of any single one of these events, would not have been possible. It may seem that this is to draw only the finest of logical distinction, one so fine indeed as to amount to little more than a sophistry. Some theologians - Calvin, for instance - have denied that the distinction between what God wills and what he permits has any meaning at all. And certainly there is no unanimity in the history of Christian exegesis on this matter. Certain classic Western interpretations of Paul's treatment of the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and of the hardened heart of Israel in Romans 9 have taken it as a clear statement of God's immediate determination of his creatures' wills. But in the Eastern Christian tradition, and in the thought of many of the greatest Western theologians, the same argument has often been understood to assert no more than that God in either case allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course, or even - like a mire in the light of the sun - to harden the outpouring of God's fiery mercy, and always for the sake of a greater good that will perhaps redound even to the benefit of the sinner. One might read Christ's answer to his disciples' question regarding why a man had been born blind - 'that the works of God should be made manifest in him' (John 9:3) - either as a refutation or as a confirmation of the distinction between divine will and permission. When all is said and done, however, not only is the distinction neither illogical nor slight; it is an absolute necessity if - setting aside, as we should, all other judgments as superstitious, stochastic, and secondary - we are to be guided by the full character of what is revealed of God in Christ. For, after all, if it is from Christ that we are to learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil, and death, it would seem that he provides us little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity: sin he forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers. And absolutely nowhere does Christ act as if any of these things are part of the eternal work or purposes of God.

Really? I'm trying to place you. It seems like we've met before." Did I just issue him a pick up line? Fantastic, I've now sunk to the level of desperate teenage boys everywhere.

The banana flavour of his accidental conception, and the banana theme of his accidental death, now all seemed to conspire against him and rather suggest the universe, Mr Fate or whoever did have some sort of master plan after all. Despite all his earlier conjecturing, maybe the universe, Mr Fate or whoever was laughing its fat and meddling head at him. The outlandish evidence did seem to speak for itself, truly suggesting a mocking narrative devised by some mischievous author because quite simply a banana condom had brought Midnight into the world and a banana skin had seen him out. Putting those two seeming truths together, Midnight was once again forced to ask such confused and searching questions like: What is this place, where am I heading? And what’s the deal with all the ruddy bananas?

The English Puritans were obsessed with the idea of providence, and that word is more ominous to them than it sounds to us. It means care, but it also means control. It does not just mean that God will provide. It means that God will provide whatever the hell God wants and the Puritans will thank him for it even if He provides them with nothing more than a slow death in a long winter. It means that if they're scared and small and lowly enough He just might toss a half-eaten corncob their way. It means that the world isn't fair and it's their fault. It means that God is the sovereign, the authority. It means manna from heaven, but it also means bow down.

The doctrine of providence, rightly understood, excludes, in all cases, the notion of chance. It tells us to recognize the hand of God, not only in important events, but in all their attendant circumstances; and what a comfort is it to mourners, what refuge from painful reflections, to know that the means are determined as well as the end -- the day and hour as well as the consummation-- and that all things are of God who hath reconciled us unto himself by Jesus Christ! - If then, God order for the minutest occurrence the moment of its advent -- if He determine when, as well as how the sparrow shall fall to the ground -- we may feel very specially assured that his perfections were engaged in timing the introduction of this seal of the covenant. -- David King, The Lords Supper. p. 61. (concerning the signs of the elements of the Lords Supper)

So in actual fact every human being is equally wealthy according to God’s divine Providence

The human mind is a lucky little local, passing accident which was totally unforeseen, and condemned to disappear with this earth and to recommence perhaps here or elsewhere the same or different with fresh combinations of eternally new beginnings. We owe it to this little lapse of intelligence on His part that we are very uncomfortable in this world which was not made for us, which had not been prepared to receive us, to lodge and feed us or to satisfy reflecting beings, and we owe it to Him also that we have to struggle without ceasing against what are still called the designs of Providence, when we are really refined and civilized beings.

Throughout this project I have been filled with grace in many ways. Indeed, I can feel God’s Providential hand at work in my life, often quite powerfully. And I have been the beneficiary of what I can only describe as miracles. Some pertain to this work. I would like to share a few of them with you because from the start I felt I was drawn to engage in this project through the call of the Holy Spirit and these events only confirm that this project was blessed from the start. I share with you not to boast, but so you may see that God often actually works powerfully in one’s life, even in seemingly little things, for it is always to His greater glory. This is why we should share such stories with each other. For if we choose to retain secretly what He has given us, it does not work for His greater glory, but for our own destruction.

The loveliest gifts sometimes come wrapped in the ugliest paper.

The worm’s bad luck is the bird’s good fortune.

...this insolence was turned by the providence of God to a very different purpose; for the face of Christ, dishonoured by spitting and blows, has restored to us that image which had been disfigured, and almost effaced, by sin.

We would either have a silent, a soft, a perfumed cross, sugared and honeyed with the consolations of Christ, or we faint; and providence must either brew a cup of gall and wormwood, mastered in the mixing with joy and songs, else we cannot be disciples. But Christ’s cross did not smile on him, his cross was a cross, and his ship sailed in blood, and his blessed soul was sea-sick, and heavy even to death.

When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with the enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking people were aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other grave sin—the virtuous are never struck by lightning. Therefore if God wants to strike any one, Benjamin Franklin [and his lightning-rod] ought not to defeat His design; indeed, to do so is helping criminals to escape. But God was equal to the occasion, if we are to believe the eminent Dr. Price, one of the leading divines of Boston. Lightning having been rendered ineffectual by the 'iron points invented by the sagacious Dr. Franklin,' Massachusetts was shaken by earthquakes, which Dr. Price perceived to be due to God's wrath at the 'iron points.' In a sermon on the subject he said, 'In Boston are more erected than elsewhere in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God.' Apparently, however, Providence gave up all hope of curing Boston of its wickedness, for, though lightning-rods became more and more common, earthquakes in Massachusetts have remained rare.

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe's couplets: Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it!

When destiny is calling even the deaf can hear him.

When shall I be past these soul-tormenting fears, and cares, and griefs, and passions? When shall I be out of this frail, this corruptible, ruinous body; this soul-contradicting, insnaring, deceiving flesh? When shall I be out of this vain and vexatious world, whose pleasures are mere deluding dreams and shadowsl whose miseries are real, numerous, and uncessant? How long shall I see the church of Christ lie trodden under the feet of persecutors ; or else, as a ship in the hands of foolish guides, though the supreme Maker doth moderate all for the best? (642-3)

What a lovely thing a rose is!" He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.

All things are ordered by God, but His providence takes in our free agency, as well as His own sovereignty.

A purpose is the eternal condition of success.

As a general rule, Providence seldom vouchsafes to mortals any more than just that degree of encouragement which suffices to keep them at a reasonably full exertion of their powers.

Bountiful as is the hand of Providence, its gifts are not so bestowed as to seduce us into indolence, but to rouse us to exertion.

Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

But I'm in favor of every religion with the possible exception of snake-chunking. Anybody that so presumes on how he stands with Providence that he will let a snake bite him, I say he deserves what he's got coming to him.

Do I learn through dark providences, or simply seem relieved when they are over?

When you are at your lowest God is getting ready to take you to your highest.

Chance is a nickname for Providence.

[D]ivine Providence... keeps the universe open in every direction to the soul.

Fate! There is no fate. Between the thought and the success God is the only agent. Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.

Fate is not the ruler, but the servant of Providence.

Fear not, but trust in Providence, Wherever thou may'st be.

Gifts come from above in their own peculiar forms. [Ger., Die Gaben Kommen von oben herab, in ihren eignen Gestalten.]