"Omnipotence" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... purpose of performing a definite function. Aristotle, like Plato, had taught that "Nature makes nothing in vain," and Galen's philosophy was greatly influenced by the teaching of Aristotle. Galen regarded his work as "a religious hymn in honour of the Creator, who has given proof of His Omnipotence in creating everything ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... the Divinity dwells in each of us, as in nature. The natural man can only attain to such knowledge as is common to all; but it is the divine capacity for serene discernment—which is omniscience—that works in the seer; it is the divine and unlimited power—which is omnipotence—that from time to time enables the magician to ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... further, Christ's absolute control of the demon. His bare word is sovereign, and secures outward obedience, though from an unsubdued and disobedient will. He cannot make the foul creature love, but He can make him act. Surely Omnipotence speaks, if demons hear and obey. Their king had been conquered, and they knew their Master. The strong man had been bound, and this is the spoiling of his house. The question of the wondering worshippers in the synagogue goes to the root of the matter, when ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... reproved, and in the midst of the successes by which patient insight will be surprised, the fact of the confirmation of species in plants and animals must remain always a miraculous one. What outstretched sign of constant Omnipotence can be more awful, than that the susceptibility to {204} external influences, with the reciprocal power of transformation, in the organs of the plant; and the infinite powers of moral training and mental conception over the nativity of animals, should be ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... failure, and had hesitated to make the attempt. The consequences were upon him, he saw the want of prompt action, and regretted that the time for carrying his resolution into effect had passed. The result harassed him; he saw this daughter of misfortune, on her bended knees, breathing a prayer to Omnipotence for the deliverance of her child; he remembered her appeal to him, imploring him to deliver her from the grasp of slavery, from that licentiousness which the female slave is compelled to bear. He saw her confiding in him as a deliverer,—the sight haunted him unto madness! Her child! her child! ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... in Quanyen, the goddess of mercy. With sailors she is the goddess of the sea. In many temples she is invoked by the sick, the halt, the blind, the impoverished. Her images are sometimes represented with a hundred arms to symbolize her omnipotence to save. Beal says of this, as Banergea says of the faith element of the Krishna cult, that it is wholly alien to the religion whose name it bears: it is not Buddhism. He thinks that it has been greatly affected by ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... fiery-visaged firmament expressed Abhorrence, and the grave of nature yawned To swallow all the dauntless and the good That dared to hurl defiance at his throne, Girt as it was with power. None but slaves Survived,—cold-blooded slaves, who did the work Of tyrannous omnipotence: whose souls No honest indignation ever urged To elevated daring, to one deed Which gross and sensual self did not pollute. These slaves built temples for the omnipotent fiend, Gorgeous and vast: the costly altars smoked With human blood, and hideous moans rung Through ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... hisses, "are those who spurned me without a hearing, who heaped injustice and ignominy upon me, who drove me from country to country, whereas I offered them superiority, invincibleness, omnipotence!" ...
— Facing the Flag • Jules Verne
... Dorothy Bonk, who at moments were entirely unable even to bend the finely tempered steel of his inflexible will, therefore on the one occasion when his decisive plans were unexpectedly frustrated an impression was photographed with extraordinary bas-relief upon his mind of the omnipotence of his quite infirm Grandfather Soddle—and of power as a concrete argument. The incident being the removal of a half-sucked tin soldier from his hand by the subtle device of striking his knuckles sharply with the fire ...
— Terribly Intimate Portraits • Noel Coward
... whimsical too. "Why, I have heard somewhere," says he, "that at its uttermost this success is but the strivings of an ape reft of his tail, and grown rusty at climbing, who yet feels himself to be a symbol and the frail representative of Omnipotence in a place that ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... clue by which to lead this troubled soul from the labyrinth in which it groped and nearly fell. When I paused, breathless, Robert turned to me, asking, as if human assurances could strengthen his faith in Divine Omnipotence,— ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 12, No. 73, November, 1863 • Various
... of the thundering cataract's roar once worshipped the roaming sons of the forest in all their primitive freedom. They recognized in its thunder the voice, in its mad waves the wrath, and in its crashing whirlpool the Omnipotence of the Great Spirit—the Manitou ...
— Birch Bark Legends of Niagara • Owahyah
... hopeless complacency of the public, the writer says: "The assumption is that the 'registered doctor' or surgeon knows everything that is known, and can do everything that is to be done. This means that the dogmas of omniscience, omnipotence and infallibility, and something very like the theory of the apostolic succession and kingship by anointment, have recovered in medicine the grip they have lost in theology and politics. This would not matter if the 'legally qualified ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... thy bark in its sublime peregrination through the ocean of ideas, methods, varieties, religions, wisdom, and human trickeries, at least their worship is unalloyed, pure, and unadulterated, and thine omnipotence, omniscience, and omni-language are by them bravely recognised. Therefore has a poor son of our merry Touraine here been anxious, however unworthily, to do thee homage by magnifying thine image, and glorifying the works of ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 2 • Honore de Balzac
... universal power; not at the time of his resurrection, but at the time of his ascension, he was seated "on the right hand of the Majesty on high." This indicates divine omnipotence. It is the continual representation of the New Testament that Jesus Christ has all authority in heaven and on earth. The ascension should therefore remind us of the limitless ...
— The Gospel of Luke, An Exposition • Charles R. Erdman
... beauty the primitive mind seeks to portray for the benefit of other primitive minds the omnipotence of the world's ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... believer in the omnipotence of vice and in the helpless suffering of virtue, who drags to light what is horrible from among the dregs of the people, seems to have nothing in common with the charming, playful figure of "le vieux Bilboquet," who gave Madame Hanska's daughter and her son-in-law a big place ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... case of Papilio dardanus alone there is much to be learnt which is of the highest importance for our understanding of transformations. It shows us chiefly what I once called, somewhat strongly perhaps, the omnipotence of natural selection in answer to an opponent who had spoken of its "inadequacy." We here see that one and the same species is capable of producing four or five different patterns of colouring and marking; thus the colouring and marking are not, as has often ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... emperor and his wife were transferred in after ages to frail mortals such as Saint Laurence and the Virgin Mary. We are reminded by the inscription above the portico of the temple, "Divo Antonino et Divae Faustina," that the government of the Caesars had become an earthly omnipotence in the estimation of the Romans and the subject nations. They looked alone to Caesar for all their good, and from him they feared their chiefest evil. He had become to them their providence or their fate. The adoration offered to him was ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... it was very great," he writes, "as it taught the English that the fancied security of their coasts was a myth, and thereby compelled their government to take expensive measures for the defense of numerous ports hitherto relying for protection wholly on the vigilance and supposed omnipotence of their navy. It also doubled or more the rates of insurance, which in the long run proved the most ...
— Paul Jones • Hutchins Hapgood
... Madame Sand will in this path prove her intellectual omnipotence, but yet she will please less, because she will be less original. She will fancy she augments her power by venturing into the depths of these reveries, beneath which we deplorable common mortals are buried, and she will be mistaken. In fact she is much superior to this extravagance, this vagueness, ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... empire of speech, and its perpetuating characters, embrace this prodigious range; but their comprehension is exclusively limited to the human race. When words can represent all that is evident and all that is conjectural—the works of Omnipotence, and the fabrications of man—we need to seek no further for the necessary materials of thought. The difficulty that has perplexed many persons respecting the compactness and unity of intelligence that a sentence contains, principally ...
— On the Nature of Thought - or, The act of thinking and its connexion with a perspicuous sentence • John Haslam
... she arrived penniless and unknown in Crowheart had been due to her brains and efforts. She raised her chin arrogantly. She had never been thwarted and the person was not born who could defeat her ultimately in any ambition! Her mental elation gave her a feeling akin to omnipotence. ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... followed by a sequence of mystical sonnets about "the Omnipotence of Love," which showed, beyond doubt, that if my father was not a scientific thinker, he was, at least, a very original poet. And this made me perplexed as to what could have drawn Wilderspin, who scorned the art of poetry, into the meshes of The ...
— Aylwin • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... 'that keepeth the hearts of princes and guideth with His breath all temporal occurrences.' Throckmorton was about to touch his cap at the name of Omnipotence, but remembering that he was among Protestants changed the direction of his hand and scratched his cheek among the little hairs of his beard; 'the signs are favourable that our good King's Highness shall still incline to ...
— Privy Seal - His Last Venture • Ford Madox Ford
... England, only to be quenched by the final overwhelming sea. But it is seldom remembered that the Puritans were in their day emphatically intellectual bullies, that they relied swaggeringly on the logical necessity of Calvinism, that they bound omnipotence itself in the chains of syllogism. The Puritans fell, through the damning fact that they had a complete theory of life, through the eternal paradox that a satisfactory explanation can never satisfy. Like Brutus ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... God is everywhere; but certainly we feel His presence most when His works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night-sky, where His worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest His infinitude, His omnipotence, His omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky- way. Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace ...
— Jane Eyre - an Autobiography • Charlotte Bronte
... Who can define the omnipotence of speech? With a few brief words God called the universe from nothingness; speech falling from the glowing lips of the Apostles, has changed the face of the earth. The current of opinion follows the prestige of speech, and to-day, as ever, eloquence is universal queen. We need feel no surprise ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... free! The beggar-garbed or over-bent with snows, Each mortal, long defeated, disallowed, Feeling her touch, grows stronger limbed, and knows The purple on his shoulders and is proud. The Spring returns! O madness beyond sense, Breed in our bones thine own omnipotence! ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 3 (of 4) • Various
... to Philistia's son A radiant cherub, and he thus begun: "Goliath, well thou know'st thou hast defy'd "Yon Hebrew armies, and their God deny'd: "Rebellious wretch! audacious worm! forbear, "Nor tempt the vengeance of their God too far: "Them, who with his Omnipotence contend, "No eye shall pity, and no arm defend: "Proud as thou art, in short liv'd glory great, "I come to tell thee thine approaching fate. "Regard my words. The Judge of all the gods, "Beneath whose steps the tow'ring mountain nods, "Will give thine armies to the savage brood, ...
— Religious and Moral Poems • Phillis Wheatley
... inquire as to the relation of the state itself to its individual members, we find the Roman polity equally remote from the laxity of a mere defensive combination and from the modern idea of an absolute omnipotence of the state. The community doubtless exercised power over the person of the burgess in the imposition of public burdens, and in the punishment of offences and crimes; but any special law inflicting, or ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... others which most commonly occurs, is that of the descent of the Gods to earth, where, in human form, they mix among mortals, and occupy themselves with their affairs, either out of a spirit of adventure, or to try the hearts of men. Such a conception is shocking to the Christian notion of the omnipotence and omnipresence of God, but we question if there be not times when the most pious and perfect Christian may not find comfort and relief from a fallacy which was a matter of faith in less enlightened creeds, and over which the apostle, writing to the Hebrews, throws ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... of power. But if, as Mr. Darwin says, life was breathed by the Creator into the first forms, this constitutes a break in the sufficiency of natural causes alone to produce life. If a special fiat was necessary at this point, why may it not have been at others? If by divine omnipotence, life is believed to have been originated, why shall we not believe that by divine omnipotence the various species of plants and animals were brought forth as related in the first chapter of the Bible? "If ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... knowledge and so on; the quality of being an effect therefore supplies a reason for inferring an intelligent agent of the kind described only, and thus is opposed to the inference of attributes of a contrary nature, viz. omniscience, omnipotence, and those other attributes that belong—to the highest Soul, whose existence you wish to establish.—Nor does this (as might be objected) imply an abandonment of all inference. Where the thing to be inferred is known through other means of proof also, any qualities of an ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... spiritualistic religions, has always insisted on the primacy of God's goodness. There has been, therefore, in certain theological quarters the tendency to surrender the conception of divine omnipotence in the face of the genuine human evils that are among the fruits of blind mechanical forces. The idea of a finite God who is infinitely good in his intentions, but limited in his powers, has been advocated by such various types of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... of borderers and adventurers, or the semi-barbarism of a civilization resolved into its primitive elements. Real republicanism is stern and severe; its essence is not in forms of government, but in the omnipotence of public opinion which grows out of it. This public opinion cannot prevent gambling with dice or stocks, but it can and does compel it to keep comparatively quiet. But horse-racing is the most public way of gambling; and with all its immense attractions ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 1, Issue 2, December, 1857 • Various
... things; plague, pestilence, and famine are admitted, by all but fools, to be the natural result of causes for the most part fully within human control, and not the unavoidable tortures inflicted by wrathful Omnipotence upon His ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... flush'd enjoyment. In the motley host Three prime gradations may be rank'd: the first, To mount upon the wings of Shakspeare's mind, And win a flash of his Promethean thought, To smile and weep, to shudder, and achieve A round of passionate omnipotence, Attend: the second, are a sensual tribe, Convened to hear romantic harlots sing, On forms to banquet a lascivious gaze, While the bright perfidy of wanton eyes Through brain and spirit darts delicious fire The last, a throng most pitiful! who seem, With their corroded figures, rayless glance, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... was still before Bismarck a period of twenty years of virtual omnipotence, it was in the memorable years of 1870 and 1871 that the apostle of blood and iron attained the zenith of his extraordinary career. Germany was his wash-pot; over France had he cast his shoe. The years of Sturm und Drang were behind him, during ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... in fact, impossible to conceive of an eternal hell co-existing with an eternal heaven, without also seeing that it limits eternally the divine Omnipotence; for the omnipotence of God is in carrying out his will to have all men saved by becoming holy. Unless God's laws are obeyed, God is not obeyed; and he is not sovereign if not obeyed. Hell is a condition of ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... have him by her side, but she was a little embarrassed none the less, looking upon him as an all-powerful, strange being, exalting him in her artless innocence to the level of an Olympian encompassed by thunder-bolts and lightning-flashes, possessing the gift of omnipotence. She talked to him, inquired if he was still satisfied with his friends, with the condition of his affairs, but did not dare to ask the question she had asked de Gery: "Why didn't you bring me my little grandsons?"—But ...
— The Nabob, Volume 1 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... mad tyrant of the main. Bid him from fight to his own deeps repair, Or breathe from slaughter in the fields of air. If he refuse, then let him timely weigh Our elder birthright, and superior sway. How shall his rashness stand the dire alarms, If heaven's omnipotence descend in arms? Strives he with me, by whom his power was given, And is there equal to ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... of politics is will-power. The more one-sided, which means the more complete, political understanding is, all the more does it believe in the omnipotence of will-power, all the more blind is it to the natural and intellectual limitations to will-power, all the more incapable is it, therefore, of discovering ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... intellect cannot be referred to any known natural forces. He avows his belief that in nature "mind governs matter," and "in the existence of a never-changing, all-seeing, power-directing and matter-guiding Omnipotence." He avows his faith in miracles, and "those miracles on which Christianity is founded." Nevertheless, his faith in all these points is provisional. He says that a truly scientific man, "if the maintenance, continuity, and nature of life on our planet ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... statues, paintings, and seals, which are the product of that early thought for which there was no essential difference between man and beast. The festival in which the gods carouse is of a piece with the divine Ethiopian feasts of Homer. On the other hand, the idea of the omnipotence of the divine word, when Marduk makes the garment disappear and reappear, is scarcely a primitive one. It is substantially identical with the Biblical "Let it be, and it was." It is probable that the poem had a long career, and in successive recensions ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... on each side. This is the Notch of the White Hills. Shame on me that I have attempted to describe it by so mean an image, feeling, as I do, that it is one of those symbolic scenes which lead the mind to the sentiment, though not to the conception, of Omnipotence. ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... forbade you to do that, with a caprice that was cold and yet somehow personal. It did not appear that Sir Joseph was popular, but he was "a household word." He was not so much a public man as a sort of private god or omnipotence. The particular man to whom I spoke said he had "been in trouble," and that Sir Joseph had been ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... gratitude assigned the tithe of his grain to the priests and the Levites. Besides, he testified his appreciation to Daniel by loading him down with gifts, and both returned to Shushtar. The recovery of the king convinced many of his subjects of the omnipotence of God, and they converted ...
— THE LEGENDS OF THE JEWS VOLUME IV BIBLE TIMES AND CHARACTERS - FROM THE EXODUS TO THE DEATH OF MOSES • BY LOUIS GINZBERG
... weaned them from the contemplation of God and divine truth, and chained them to the triumphal car of a material and infidel philosophy. As the great and besetting sin of the Jews before the Captivity was idolatry, which thus was the principal subject of rebuke from the messengers of Omnipotence,—the one thing which the Jews were warned to avoid; as hypocrisy and Pharisaism and a technical and legal piety were the greatest vices to be avoided when Christ began his teachings,—so Epicureanism in life and philosophy was the greatest evil with which the early Christians had ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... good; but it clearly denoted how far the boldest designs, the most ample means, and the most vaulting ambition, fall short of giving that sublime consciousness of power and its fruits that distinguish the reign of Omnipotence. ...
— The Sea Lions - The Lost Sealers • James Fenimore Cooper
... force without question, and the worry of her search disappeared. It seemed certain that this omnipotence, whatever it might be, was reading her wishes and acting with all its power to fulfill them, so that in the end it was merely a question of time before she should accomplish her mission—before she should meet Pierre le ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... representing the sun cherished pretensions to universal dominion. The goddesses shared in supreme power. Isis was entitled lady and mistress of Buto, as Hathor was at Denderah, and as Nit was at Sais. The animal-gods shared omnipotence with those in human form. Each of the feudal divinities appropriated two companions and formed a trinity; or, as it is generally called, a triad. Often the local deity was content with one wife and one son, but often he was united ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... God's masonry, and my soul had expanded in gazing on its sublimity. I have seen the ocean singing its wild chorus of sounding waves, and ecstacy has thrilled upon the living chords of my heart. I have since then seen the rainbow-crowned Niagara chanting the choral hymn of Omnipotence, girdled with grandeur, and robed with glory; but none of these things have melted me as the first sight of Free Land. Towering mountains lifting their hoary summits to catch the first faint flush of day when the sunbeams kiss the ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still
... garden—a series of terraces to resemble hills, to please his Median queen. This palace, with the garden, was eight miles in circumference, and splendidly decorated with statues of men and animals. Here the mighty monarch, after his great military expeditions, solaced himself, and dreamed of omnipotence, until a sudden stroke of madness—that form which causes a man to mistake himself for a brute animal—sent him from his luxurious halls into the gardens he had planted. His madness lasted seven years, and he died, after a reign of forty-three ...
— Ancient States and Empires • John Lord
... man found himself in the midst of an heraldic vision, in which he could act and speak and live lyrically. While the author and the victims alike treated the whole matter as a silly public charade, this one man, by taking it seriously, sprang suddenly into a throne of artistic omnipotence. Armour, music, standards, watch-fires, the noise of drums, all the theatrical properties were thrown before him. This one poor rhymster, having burnt his own rhymes, began to live that life of open air and acted poetry of which all the poets of the earth have dreamed in vain; the life for which ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... the shrine. The Madonna looked gravely upon her. The holy Babe gazed with omniscient eyes, holding forth tiny hands of omnipotence. ...
— The White Ladies of Worcester - A Romance of the Twelfth Century • Florence L. Barclay
... disciplined it. Believe me, even then he will not cease to create scandals, but they will be historical events. Heaven deliver us from such events! For they will emanate from the merchant's thirst for power; their aim will be the omnipotence of one class, and the merchant will not be particular about the means toward the attainment of ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... day of joy—overflowing, unsullied, serene, a day of hope, a day of faith. It is a day of courage and of cheer, and to the world it speaks a gospel of freedom and fellowship. It proclaims the dawn of a higher life for all, the sanctity and omnipotence of love. It asserts the elemental rights of man. These friends of ours announce ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... recorded in the New Testament were performed at this period; and it is not unreasonable to conclude that, in a city so much given to jugglery and superstition, these genuine displays of the power of Omnipotence were exhibited for the express purpose of demonstrating the incomparable superiority of the Author of Christianity. It is said that "God wrought special miracles by the hands of Paul, so that from his ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... he, "I too acknowledge the all-but omnipotence of early culture and nurture: hereby we have either a doddered dwarf bush, or a high-towering, wide-shadowing tree; either a sick yellow cabbage, or an edible luxuriant green one. Of a truth, it is the duty of all men, especially of all philosophers, to note down with ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... moralists, that every man's fortune was in his own power, that prudence supplied the place of all other divinities, and that happiness is the unfailing consequence of virtue. But, surely, the quiver of Omnipotence is stored with arrows, against which the shield of human virtue, however adamantine it has been boasted, is held up in vain: we do not always suffer by our crimes; we are not always protected ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume IV: The Adventurer; The Idler • Samuel Johnson
... them by terror, or to annihilate them by death. I have often heard them assert that abundance, as well as happiness, can only proceed from an equitable, protecting, and beneficent government. The omnipotence of the bayonet may produce fear, but not bread. I have seen them animated by the most lively enthusiasm for the good of the people, disdaining to flatter them, and resolved rather to fall victims to their delusion than to be the means ...
— Madame Roland, Makers of History • John S. C. Abbott
... National Assembly."[489] The power of constitutional amendment is therefore vested absolutely in the parliamentary chambers, under the requirement simply that (p. 328) it be exercised in joint session. The only limitation that has been imposed on parliamentary omnipotence in this direction is a clause adopted in an amendment of August 13, 1884, to the effect that "the republican form of government shall not be made the subject of a proposed revision."[490] As in the ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg
... their priests, and prostrated themselves before the altars. The melancholy chant of the penitent alone was heard; enemies were reconciled; men and women vied with each other in splendid works of charity, as if they dreaded that divine omnipotence would pronounce on them the doom ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... the saddest example of a nation without a God, and succeeding generations will only add a new lustre to our present resplendent glory, bound together by the most sacred ties of goodwill; independent, yet acknowledging the sovereignty of Omnipotence, and it was fraught with vital interest to ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... proclivities were more pronounced than those of other children I cannot say, but certainly, as a child, I was in the habit of appealing to Omnipotence ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... laid the earth's foundation, "shut in the sea with doors," whose voice is thunder and whose creatures are all things that have being, is, we trust, moral and good. But it is His omnipotence that strikes us most forcibly. Almighty in theory, He is all active in fact, and nothing that happens in the universe is brought about even indirectly by any one but Himself. There are no second causes at ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... to feel (what is the truth) that there is nothing in me keeping me back from the grossest and vilest sin. This is a delusion of the devil. My only safety is to know, feel, and confess my helplessness, that I may hang upon the arm of Omnipotence ... I daily wish that sin had been rooted out of my heart. I say, 'Why did God leave the root of lasciviousness, pride, anger, etc., in my bosom? He hates sin, and I hate it; why did He not take it clean away?' I know many answers to this which completely ...
— The Biography of Robert Murray M'Cheyne • Andrew A. Bonar
... both prophets and sibyls, as compared to their usual relation to the subjects they environ. They sit here on twelve throne-like niches, more like presiding deities, each wrapt in self-contemplation, than as tributary witnesses to the truth and omnipotence of Him they are intended to announce. Thus they form a gigantic frame-work round the subjects of the Creation, of which the birth of Eve, as the type of the Nativity, is the intentional centre. For some reason, the twelve figures are not prophets and sibyls alternately—there ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... so, Boy, that she sometimes seems to live again in you. Like her, you believe so thoroughly in the goodness and greatness of a God—in the beauty and glory of the world fraught with lessons of life and death—in the omnipotence of Fate—in the truth and power and grandeur of overmastering love. You believe in the past, in all the dreams and legends of the Long Ago still relived in the Now, in the capabilities of the human mind, the kingship of the soul. Your voice is hers, every tone and cadence is as ...
— One Day - A sequel to 'Three Weeks' • Anonymous
... flourish and wither, dynasties pass away like a tale that is told; but nothing is by chance, though men, in their ignorance of causes, may think so. The deeds of time are governed, as well as judged, by the decrees of eternity. The caprice of fleeting existences bends to the immovable omnipotence, which plants its foot on all the centuries and has neither change of purpose nor repose. Sometimes, like a messenger through the thick darkness of night, it steps along mysterious ways; but when the hour strikes for a people, ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... of the Divine ideas, and by a principle which, in its universality and omnipotence in the frame of Nature, seems itself an attribute of the Divine, the principle of conflict, these ideas realize their ends in and through conflict. The scientific form which it assumes in the hypothesis of evolution is but the pragmatic expression of this mystery. ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... for the great man did not trouble himself with a personal answer. His reply was given vicariously, through one P. T. Mallencroft, his secretary, on flawless paper, three sentences in bold clear type and a Spencerian signature closing it. It was a bloodless thing. It spoke the commands of omnipotence as though carved ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... age-long silences, through surge Of world upheaval, coming to their aim As swerveless in fit time as tho' His finger But yesterday ordained, and wrought to-day. How the Eternal's unconcern of time,— Omnipotence that hath not dreamed of haste,— Is graven in granite-moulding aeons' gloom; Is told in stony record of the roar Of long Silurian storms, and tempests huge Scourging the circuit of Devonian seas; Is whispered in the noiseless ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... going to visit Him. He goes in the full pride of a personality which sees in itself all the great events of the past, gathered together as in an historic procession. He goes, with all the pomp and circumstance of a glorious omnipotence, he, whose diplomacy has made a protege of the Khalif and a footstool of the Crescent—he goes, I say, to manifest himself as ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... alert preparations for defence; and neither Christian nor Bridgenorth held it sound policy to practise openly, even under parliamentary authority, against a lady so little liable to hesitate upon the measures most likely to secure her feudal sovereignty; wisely considering that even the omnipotence, as it has been somewhat too largely styled, of Parliament, might fail to relieve them from the personal ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... beauty, depraving joy, deflecting the will, with wages of death for its victims, and the hell of final destruction spreading beneath its sway? so that the world as it now is cannot be thought of as the will of God exercised in Omnipotence, but a human opportunity of union with or separation from the ideal order in conflict with the order of death. I recall Newman's picture: "To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... essentially present in hell as in heaven; but the inhabitants of those accursed places behold him only in his wrath, and shrink within the flames to conceal themselves from him. It is not in the power of imagination to conceive the fearful effects of Omnipotence incensed. ...
— The Young Gentleman and Lady's Monitor, and English Teacher's Assistant • John Hamilton Moore
... Him. These atoms, combining and forming shapes, forms, etc., are the basis of the material universe. It is held, however, that the power or energy whereby these atoms combine and thus form matter, comes from God. This teaching holds that God is a Personal Being, possessing Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence. It is also held that there are two substances, or principles, higher, that the material energies or substance, namely, Manas, or Mind, and Atman, or Spirit. Manas or Mind is held to be something like a Mind-Stuff, from which all individual ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... I plunged yet deeper in the ravine of Arve. The immense mountains and precipices that overhung me on every side, the sound of the river raging among the rocks, and the dashing of the waterfalls around spoke of a power mighty as Omnipotence—and I ceased to fear or to bend before any being less almighty than that which had created and ruled the elements, here displayed in their most terrific guise. Still, as I ascended higher, the valley ...
— Frankenstein - or The Modern Prometheus • Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley
... his arm around her. "Very well. What more can we wish to be sure of than Omnipotence and Omnipresence. You know that it is only good that is constructive. Evil is destructive, and in the end even destroys itself. So long as you want only good you are safe in the everlasting arms and are blessed." The speaker changed his ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... and power of love is based on his belief in its divine origin. Twice at least, in "Easter Day" and "Saul," his characters work out from an overpowering recognition of God's omniscience and omnipotence to a final recognition that his love is equal in scope with his power and knowledge. And he counts human service as most complete when, as in David before Saul, it reaches out to God's love and recruits its failing forces from the ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... little I know to prove the foolishness of idolatry. I do not argue against knowledge; I argue against knowledge-worship. For here, I see in your Essay, that you are not contented with raising human knowledge into something like divine omnipotence, you must also confound her with virtue. According to you, we have only to diffuse the intelligence of the few among the many, and all at which we preachers aim is accomplished.—Nay more; for whereas we humble preachers have never presumed to say, with the heathen Stoic, that even virtue ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... round the Palais- Royal; one night the queen was obliged to let the people into her chamber; the king was asleep; and two officers of the town-guard watched for some hours at his pillow. The yoke of Richelieu and the omnipotence of Mazarin were less hard for royalty to bear than the capricious and jealous tyranny ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... point, he is a believer without owning it; he must have had his certainty from Scripture; all the reason he boasts can only shew it probable, and that probability is loaded with so many difficulties as will much weaken hope. Where can reason say immortality shall stop? We must allow that Omnipotence may bestow it on such ranks of being as he pleases. But how can reason tell us to whom he has given it? Whether to all creation, or no part of it? Pride indeed makes man claim it for himself, but deny it to others; and yet the superior intelligence perceivable in some brutes, ...
— A Description of Millenium Hall • Sarah Scott
... disfavor, the railroad could ignore it, cut it off from commerce, slay it. To Gopher Prairie the tracks were eternal verities, and boards of railroad directors an omnipotence. The smallest boy or the most secluded grandam could tell you whether No. 32 had a hot-box last Tuesday, whether No. 7 was going to put on an extra day-coach; and the name of the president of the road was familiar to every ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... thing with regard to "X" is that he is all along assuming this fundamental fact himself; though he utterly fails to put two and two together, and see how this fact conflicts with the omnipotence which he ascribes to legislation. Let us go back to the assertion, which embodies his whole practical argument, that the majority of the voters in New York State could, without interfering with the activity of any one of its citizens, limit incomes in any ...
— A Critical Examination of Socialism • William Hurrell Mallock
... omnipotent, Feeling there is no bar he cannot break, Knowing there is no bound he cannot pass; Might he not then despise the written page, A petty music, and a puny scene? Conceive a spectacle not witnessed yet, When he, an artist in omnipotence, Uses for colour this red blood of ours, Composes music out of dreadful cries, His orchestra our human agonies, His rhythms lamentations of the ruined, His poet's fire not circumscribed by words, But now translated into burning cities, His scenes the lives of men, their ...
— Nero • Stephen Phillips
... fleshly arm do we disturb your knights and barons in their prosecution of barbarous festivities, and murderous feuds, which you call enjoying their homes and protecting their domains, —not that Omnipotence requires their arm of flesh to execute the great predestined work of liberation—but for the weal of their immortal souls." These last words he pronounced ...
— The Betrothed • Sir Walter Scott
... a great mistake to put before young children ideas which are really beyond the conception of an adult. There are many stories told of how children receive teaching about the Omniscience or Omnipotence of God. The stories sound irreverent, and are often repeated as highly amusing, but they are really more pathetic. Miss Shinn tells of one poor mite who resented being constantly watched and said, "I will not be so tagged," and another ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... spiritual infancy resulted. It was what he sought. He wanted to be a god himself and he became one. His power and, after him, that of his successors, had no earthly limit, no restraint human or divine. It was the same omnipotence here that ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... almost overwhelming power. The force of the David may succeed against Goliath; but in Michael Angelo's later works the struggle always appears to be a hopeless one, nobly as his Titans fight against fate and omnipotence. The face of the David is a development of the Saint George of Or San Michele, by Donatello, and the figure is of the same type, only this triumphant boy of Michael Angelo's shows a more exact study of the antique than the naturalistic work of his master. In Donatello ...
— Michael Angelo Buonarroti • Charles Holroyd
... explains to them that they have done, under Prussian tyranny for these two years past. Immediate dead-lift effort there shall be; that is certain: and 'the Almighty God assisting, who does not leave such injustices unpunished, We have the fixed Christian hope, Omnipotence blessing our arms, of almost immediately (EHESTENS) delivering you from this temporary Bondage (BISHERIGEN JOCH).' You can pray, in the mean while, for the success of her Majesty's arms; good fighting, aided by prayer, in a Cause clearly Heaven's, will now, to appearance, bring ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the most excessive pleasure and satisfaction. May the Omnipotence preserve you, my steadfast, firm friends! The pen of friendship itself cannot sufficiently express your generosity and benevolence, and that of the Begum of high dignity, who so graciously has interested herself in this matter. Inclosed is an address for her, which please to forward. I hope ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VIII. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... The omnipotence of the majority appears to me to present such extreme perils to the American republics, that the dangerous measure which is used to repress it, seems to be more advantageous than prejudicial. And here ...
— American Institutions and Their Influence • Alexis de Tocqueville et al
... capacity which his previous labors had deserved. Just as a painter is invariably included in a category as a landscape painter, a portrait painter, a painter of history, of sea pieces, or of genre, by a public consisting of artists, connoisseurs, and simpletons, who, out of envy, or critical omnipotence, or prejudice, fence in his intellect, assuming, one and all, that there are ganglions in every brain—a narrow judgment which the world applies to writers, to statesmen, to everybody who begins with ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... set the whole District agog. The crucial moment for the House of Brull had come, and all its loyal henchmen, as though still uncertain of the Party's omnipotence, and fearing the sudden appearance of hidden enemies, were running this way and that about the city and the outlying towns, shouting Rafael's name as a clarion call ...
— The Torrent - Entre Naranjos • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... philosophy has had to struggle ever since philosophy began. The Manichean, by referring evil to an independent cause, denies the existence of an absolute first principle at all; the Leibnitzian, with his hypothesis of the best possible world, virtually sets bounds to the Divine omnipotence: the Pantheist identifies God with all actual existence, and either denies the real existence of evil at all, or merges the distinction between evil and good in some higher indifference. All these conclusions ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... upon a throne of living fire The Fiend was seated; in his eye there shone The look that dared Omnipotence; the light Of sateless vengeance, and sublime despair.— He sat amid a burning world, and saw Tormented myriads, whose blaspheming shrieks Were mingled with the howl of hidden floods, And Acherontine groans; of all the host, The only dauntless ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 12, Issue 337, October 25, 1828. • Various
... thus (6) to grant a sure defence, (6) The doctor hath a Belongs to God's (7) omnipotence; mighty affection for the particle thus: he uses it four times in this Psalm, and 100 times in other places, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... bed and board through the lengthening years. For this first year—often the first months of it—marks the transition from love to conjugal affection, or witnesses a rupture which nothing less than omnipotence can ever mend. In the first year a serious readjustment must take place. Unreason, as a basis for the relation, must give way to reason; blind, ignorant, selfish little love must flutter away, so that friendship, clear-eyed and wise, ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... outstripping the sturdy pedestrian Time Nothing the body suffers that the soul may not profit by Nothing is a secret that has been spoken Now far from him under the failure of an effort to come near O self! self! self! Observation is the most, enduring of the pleasures of life Omnipotence, which is in the image of themselves One might build up a respectable figure in negatives Openly treated; all had an air of being on the surface Or where you will, so that's in Ireland Our weakness is the swiftest dog to hunt us Our bravest, our best, have an impulse to run Owner ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Peter Mortensgaard is Lord and Chieftain of the Future. I have never stood in a more august presence. Peter Mortensgaard has the power of omnipotence in him. He can do ...
— Rosmerholm • Henrik Ibsen
... hawking in all weathers, and following the advice of his falconers rather than that of his physicians. Charles thus succeeded to Castile, Aragon and Naples;[229] but (p. 093) Naples was seriously threatened by the failure of Maximilian's expedition and the omnipotence of Francis in Italy. "The Pope is French," wrote an English diplomatist, "and everything from Rome to Calais."[230] To save Naples, Charles, in July, 1516, entered into the humiliating Treaty of Noyon with France.[231] He bound himself to marry ...
— Henry VIII. • A. F. Pollard
... his unquestioned omnipotence at home, and drunken with the delirious dream that God's wrath was breathing through him upon a revolted world, he essayed to crush heresy throughout Europe; and in this mad and awful crime his people undoubtingly seconded him. In this he ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... to the Eighteenth Amendment almost exactly the status then reserved for Omnipotence. You found yourself confronted by occasionally enforced if obviously unreasonable supernal statutory decrees, which every one broke now and then as a matter of convenience: and every now and then, also, somebody was caught and punished, either in this world ...
— The Jewel Merchants - A Comedy In One Act • James Branch Cabell
... basis of slave labor they asserted their omnipotence in war and ability to continue the struggle without limit of time. The subsidized press of England supported this theory, and declared that with such advantages it was idle for the Federal Government to maintain a struggle in the face of such belligerent advantages! ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... are you?" said Frederick amazed. "You who know what passes in my heart—you whose glances chill me with horror—you, who promise me a miracle which only omnipotence can accomplish. Who ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various
... found the spaciousness and newness of this life inviting and satisfying. Here there seemed to be no limit, either to the space or to the flights that one's soul might take, and in the solemn grandeur of the open she felt the omnipotence of God and the ...
— The Range Boss • Charles Alden Seltzer
... theories of race offered by some ethnological professors. Blood, perhaps, is thicker than water; but brains are sometimes thicker than anything. But if there is one thing yet more thick and obscure and senseless than this theory of the omnipotence of race it is, I think, that to which Shaw has fled for refuge from it; this doctrine of the omnipotence of climate. Climate again is something; but if climate were everything, Anglo-Indians would grow more and more to look like Hindoos, which is far ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... all—even the good, who are deluded into considering evil a necessary portion of humanity; a victim full of fortitude and hope and the Spirit of triumph, emanating from a reliance in the ultimate omnipotence of Good." In the Greek play, Zeus is an usurper in heaven who has supplanted an older and milder dynasty of gods, and Prometheus, visited in his punishment by the nymphs of ocean, knows a secret on which the rule of Zeus depends. Shelley took over these features, ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... From the time it was created, man has striven to force from it the secret of unlimited power. Events have sometimes seemed to give encouragement, but ever at the end of each seeming success has come the unmistakable warning of a wisely jealous God. Omnipotence is not for mortals. The only lever which really moves the world is love, and it rests ...
— The Lever - A Novel • William Dana Orcutt
... the demon, fast, scourge, kill the body, that the soul may live! What are we, miserable worms, that we should defy the Most High, that we should set our wretched faculties against His Omnipotence? Submit—submit—humble yourself, my brother! Fling away the freedom which is your ruin. There is no freedom for man. Either a slave to Christ, or a slave to his own lusts—there is no other choice. Go away; exchange your work here for a time for work in London. You have too much leisure here: Satan ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... and on the danger to which I might expose myself in the way thither. I began, likewise, to consider Carwin's return to molest me as exceedingly improbable. He had relinquished, of his own accord, his design, and departed without compulsion. "Surely," said I, "there is omnipotence in the cause that changed the views of a man like Carwin. The divinity that shielded me from his attempts will take suitable care of my future safety. Thus to yield to my fears is to deserve that ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown
... 25, on Bellarmino's doctrine. Sarpi's Letters, vol. i. pp. 138, 243. Sarpi says that he and Gillot had both had their portraits painted in a picture of Hell and shown to the common folk as foredoomed to eternal fire, because they opposed doctrines of Papal omnipotence. Ibid. p. 151.] ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds
... answered one of the higher officers of Cialdini's staff. "France has no need to re-inforce her army of occupation. See these wires, gentlemen (pointing to the telegraph), if they chose to speak they would suffice to stop us at once." It would have been impossible to express more plainly the omnipotence at that moment of the conqueror of Solferino, and the fearful stigma which he was preparing for his memory. Not only did he disorganize the defence, the responsibility, &c., of which he was understood to have assumed, not only did he deceive the Court of Rome, and inspire it with a false ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... is not in the power of God to bring it about, that the angles of a triangle taken together shall amount to anything else than two right angles, so it is not within the compass of Divine omnipotence to create a man for whom it shall be a good and proper thing, and befitting his nature, to blaspheme, to perjure himself, to abandon himself recklessly to lust, or anger, or any other passion. God need not have ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... intelligent and modest. But his delicate wit and beautiful sentiments failed to charm her. She did not love him and sometimes his refined irony even irritated her. His perpetual doubts hurt her, for he believed in nothing, and she believed in everything. She believed in divine providence, in the omnipotence of evil spirits, in spells, exorcisms, and eternal justice; she believed in Jesus Christ, and in the goddess of good of the Syrians; she believed also that bitches barked when black Hecate passed through the streets, and that a woman could inspire love ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... That Omnipotence which has called the world with all its living creatures into one animated being, especially reveals Himself in the desolation of great pestilences. The powers of creation come into violent collision; the sultry dryness of the atmosphere; the subterraneous ...
— The Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... Christ Child dressed as a Captain-General with the three-cornered hat, sword, and boots, as in the children's ball at Madrid that character is represented—which signified for Capitan Tiago that while God might include in His omnipotence the power of a Captain-General of the Philippines, the Franciscans would nevertheless play with Him as with a doll. There, might also be seen a St. Anthony the Abbot with a hog by his side, a hog ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... philosophy of society. We can hardly wonder at it. What is interesting, and what we do not notice earlier in the century, is that in the System of Nature the revolt against the impotence of society, and the revolt against the omnipotence of God, made a firm coalition. That coalition came to a bloody end for the time, four-and-twenty years after Holbach's book proclaimed it, when the Committee of Public Safety despatched Hebert, and better men than Hebert, to the guillotine for being atheists. Atheism, as Robespierre ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... in its attempts to master the workings of the material universe, has thus given us a creation which in many of its attributes rivals Omnipotence. It is the sum of all contradictions, and the source of all reality. The gross matter which we see and feel is one state of it; electricity, which is without form and void, is another state of it; and our minds and souls, Sir Oliver Lodge intimates, may be still another ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... them only but of their manifold successors, the miracle, by the very multiplication of its manifestations, becomes incredible—inconsistent with any worthy conception of an all-seeing, all-provident Omnipotence. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various |
