"Omnipotency" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... former: not only opening our understanding to conceive the true sense of the Scriptures by the general notions of reason and rules of speech, but chiefly opening our belief, in drawing us into a due meditation of the omnipotency of God, which is chiefly signed and engraven upon His works. Thus much therefore for divine testimony and evidence concerning the true ...
— The Advancement of Learning • Francis Bacon
... and from Kirkham in Lancashire. Mistress Blanche, if she can hear and make distinction betwixt all these at the self-same moment, then is she no woman like to you. Your brain should be mazed with the din, and spent with the labour. Invocation declareth omnipotency. And there is none almighty save ...
— Clare Avery - A Story of the Spanish Armada • Emily Sarah Holt
... respect they differ from Peter, for "he was sleeping between two soldiers." Besides this, there were men stationed at the door to keep watch all night. But the Lord is prepared for every emergency. What storm can sink a ship when Omnipotence is at the helm? If you or I, brethren, were to see a brother confined and guarded as Peter was, I greatly fear we would utterly despair of ever seeing him rescued; especially so if public sentiment were rife with malice and rage against him. ...
— Life and Labors of Elder John Kline, the Martyr Missionary - Collated from his Diary by Benjamin Funk • John Kline
... as that Nature itself impelled them to collect wealth as the load-stone draws towards it iron. Having possessed nothing, they became rich, having become rich they became richer, having founded their fortunes on small schemes, they increased them by enormous ones. In time they attained that omnipotence of wealth which it would seem no circumstance can control or limit. The first Reuben Vanderpoel could not spell, the second could, the third was as well educated as a man could be whose sole profession is money-making. ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... pleasure, always fresh in the minds of women, the omnipotence of her magnificent regard by the answer which, without saying a word, the chevalier made to it. And in fact, the blushes which empurpled his cheeks spoke better than the best speeches of the Greek and ...
— Droll Stories, Volume 1 • Honore de Balzac
... I had succumbed supinely to this imperious domination. The sentiment of deep awe with which I habitually regarded the elevated character, the majestic wisdom, the apparent omnipresence and omnipotence of Wilson, added to a feeling of even terror, with which certain other traits in his nature and assumptions inspired me, had operated, hitherto, to impress me with an idea of my own utter weakness and helplessness, and to suggest an implicit, although bitterly ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... feeling several inches higher than when he came in. Such is the power of a good address, and such is the omnipotence of the great organ. Mr. Jerry Hollowell sat down and began to fan himself. It was very hot ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... in the woods to hardships and dangers since their infancy. They appear as if they were entirely unacquainted with, and had never felt the passion of fear. With their rifles in their hands, they assume a kind of omnipotence over their enemies. One cannot much wonder at this when we mention a fact which can be fully attested by several of the reputable persons who were eye-witnesses of it. Two brothers in the company took a piece of board five inches broad, and seven ...
— American Prisoners of the Revolution • Danske Dandridge
... it 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 created ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... more than all these, for the hills and heights of Scotland were to its dazzled vision covered that day with the mustered armies of the dreadful God: the angels of his wrath in their burning chariots; the archangels of his omnipotence, calm in their armour of storms and flaming fires, and the Rider on the white ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... Starts one dull sleeper; then another stirs, A third cries out a warning, and at last The people are awake! Oh, when as one The many rise, united and alert, With Justice for their motto, they reflect The mighty force of God's Omnipotence. And nothing stands before them. Lusty Greed, Tyrannical Corruption long in power, And smirking Cant (whose right hand robs and slays So that the left may dower Church and School), Monopoly, whose mandate took from Toil The ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... saw irradiated the young, open, still Mary's-brow, and the delicate proportions, which, like the white attire, seemed to exalt the form. Thou too fortunate man!—to whom the only visible goddess, Beauty, appears so suddenly, in her omnipotence! ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... 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 ...
— 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 Black Death, and The Dancing Mania • Justus Friedrich Karl Hecker
... a Supreme Lord, limited in 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 ...
— The Vedanta-Sutras with the Commentary by Ramanuja - Sacred Books of the East, Volume 48 • Trans. George Thibaut
... old familiar, slyly peeping? Of what use, then, were clubs? When were things ever settled, if she could be conscious of a little cloud no larger than a man's hand even now, with the living guarantee of her omnipotence ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... were well aware of the abuses, and strove more or less to root them out, but the success which attended their efforts does not give us a very exalted idea of the practical omnipotence of autocracy. In a centralised bureaucratic administration, in which each official is to a certain extent responsible for the sins of his subordinates, it is always extremely difficult to bring an official culprit to justice, for he is sure to be protected by his superiors; ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... 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 may ...
— The Philosophy of the Conditioned • H. L. Mansel
... this in mind I began to suspect what Jesus is. It is really so simple, so perfectly obvious. One or the other: either this butterfly decoration originated accidentally, or it was made with intention, feeling and thoughtful consideration. For centuries God, the Supreme Omnipotence, has been held responsible for it. And when the scholars finally could no longer believe in so many contradictions and so many imperfections in an almighty, perfect Being, then they tried their best ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... to delineate the Deity we had yet seen; and it caused us all to shudder. He is represented in the person of an old man looking from the clouds, in the centre of the ceiling, and the King appears among the angels that surround him. Flattery could not go much farther, without encroaching on omnipotence itself. ...
— Recollections of Europe • J. Fenimore Cooper
... body of belief expressed in the prayer. First it lays hold on the creative omnipotence of God, and thence passes to the recognition of His written revelation. The Church has begun to learn the inmost meaning of the Old Testament, and to find Christ there. David may not have written the second Psalm. Its attribution to him by the Church stands on a different level from Christ's ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... 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 body were brought unto the sick handkerchiefs ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen
... there to sleep as quietly as the protesters themselves. The active resistance of the English working-men has its effect in holding the money greed of the bourgeoisie within certain limits, and keeping alive the opposition of the workers to the social and political omnipotence of the bourgeoisie, while it compels the admission that something more is needed than Trades Unions and strikes to break the power of the ruling class. But what gives these Unions and the strikes arising from them their real importance is this, that they are the first ...
— The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 - with a Preface written in 1892 • Frederick Engels
... impassioned detestation of the latter term possessed him. The essence of the Meikeljohns was a necessity for freedom, an almost bitter pride in the independence of their bodies. Their souls they held to be under the domination of a relentless Omnipotence, evolved, it might have been, from the obdurate and resplendent granite masses of the highland where they had first survived. These qualities gave to Elim Meikeljohn's political enmity for the South a fervor closely resembling ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... by the Conference. And yet it was the motive for several, for although no allusion was made to the hegemony of Anglo-Saxondom, it was ever operative in the subconsciousness of the two plenipotentiaries. And in view of the omnipotence of these two nations, they temporarily sacrificed consistency to tactics, probably without conscientious qualms, and certainly without political misgivings. That would seem to be a partial explanation of the lengths to which ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Now the omnipotence of thoughts is not without reason. Man is the child of genius because he is the child of God. Those beautiful words, "made in His image," tell us that the human mechanism is patterned after the divine. Reason and memory in man answer to those faculties in God, as do conscience ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... then, is the sphere of National Service. Who will not come forward to help democracy to become conscious of its power and its dignity; to aid it in establishing its authority over all rebels and rivals; to teach it how to use its omnipotence gently, so as to leave to those beneath its sway the largest possible room for freedom consistent with the common good; to make it aware of its responsibilities for its vast dominions across the seas and their teeming populations; to awaken it to a realization ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... perfect conformity with the law. God has made all rational free agents for virtue, and all worlds for rational free agents. The Moral Law, therefore, not only reigns throughout His creation, (all its behests being enforced thereon by His omnipotence,) but is itself the reason why that creation ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... facie no ground for not trying to apply to experience such categories, for instance, as that of personal omnipotence, as if everything were necessarily arranged as we may command or require. On this principle children often seem to conceive a world in which they are astonished not to find themselves living. Or we may try aesthetic categories and allow our reproductive imagination—by ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... the Grand Lama. In China he is incarnate 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
... bewails as the most uncertain of 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 helpless handiwork. ...
— The Origin of Species - From 'The Westminster Review', April 1860 • Thomas H. Huxley
... the nature of things,—that is, as the laws of nature and matter—allowed him; which is nonsense, if those laws were made by him, and leaves the question where it was, or rather solves it by giving up the omnipotence of the Creator, if these laws were binding ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... song, feasting, and gratulation; dire plots are hatched and blaze forth into light; will clashes with will; Heaven opens, and a torrent of flaming ruin is poured forth into the deep. The Victor, ensconced in his omnipotence, is fiercely triumphant; and in the dark below there is the dull gleam of unconquered pride, deadly courage, and immortal despair. But in the midst of all this vast rivalry of interests and jar of opposed ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... that, though the influence of the Christian Church and that of its Roman branch in particular, has asserted and reasserted itself in various ways and degrees in various ages, yet in England, as elsewhere, the epoch of its moral omnipotence had come to an end many generations before the disruption of its external framework. In the fourteenth century men had long ceased to look for the mediation of the Church between an overbearing Crown and a baronage and commonalty eager for the maintenance of their rights or for ...
— Chaucer • Adolphus William Ward
... intelligent creation, and the desire to communicate, guide and bless, is responded to by man, who loves, obeys, and enjoys. Nothing is gained by attributing to nature vicegerent forces. Is it not preferable to say that she responds to intelligent, loving Omnipotence? Our finiteness is illustrated by our initiation into organized being. Emerging from a rayless atom, too diminutive for the sight, we gradually develop and advance to the maturity of those conscious ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... grand designs, Omnipotence with wisdom shines; His works, through all this wondrous frame, Bear the great ...
— The Otterbein Hymnal - For Use in Public and Social Worship • Edmund S. Lorenz
... at last into the precision of watchmaking; Titanian hammer-strokes beating, out of lava, these glittering cylinders and timely-respondent valves, and fine ribbed rods, which touch each other as a serpent writhes, in noiseless gliding, and omnipotence of grasp; infinitely complex anatomy of active steel, compared with which the skeleton of a living creature would seem, to a careless observer, clumsy and vile—a mere morbid secretion and phosphatous prop of flesh! ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... right! dare to be true! Cannot Omnipotence carry you through? City, and mansion, and throne all in sight— Can you not dare to ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... I retrace my way toward a makeshift of Omnipotence. But for this I will have to find ...
— Fantazius Mallare - A Mysterious Oath • Ben Hecht
... not have been shocked at all at the idea that he might not please to give this or that man any help. In their eyes power was a grander thing than love, though it is nowhere said in the Book that God is omnipotence. Such, because they are told that he is omnipotent, call him Omnipotence; when told that he is Love, do not care to argue that he must then be loving? But as to doing what he wills with a word—see what it cost him to redeem the world! He did not find that easy, or to be ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... whatever of evil there may be in any person or in any movement, it is of necessity temporary, because it is opposed to the resistless stream of evolution; whereas whatever is good in any person or in any movement must necessarily be persistent and useful, because it has behind it the omnipotence of that current, and therefore it must abide and ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... of the nice division of jurisdiction set up by the American constitution and by the British North America Act. There are, of course, limits to its power. In the strict sense of legal theory, the omnipotence of the British Parliament, as in the case of Canada, remains unimpaired. Nor can it alter certain things,—for example, the native franchise of the Cape, and the equal status of the two languages,—without a special majority vote. But in all the ordinary conduct ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... been shown[32] how, in Syria, the idea of an infinite repetition of cycles of years according to which the celestial revolutions took place, led to the conception of divine eternity, how the theory of a fatal domination of the stars over the earth brought about that of the omnipotence of the "lord of the heavens," and how the introduction of a universal religion was the necessary result of the belief that the stars exerted an influence upon the peoples of every climate. The logic of all these consequences of the principles of astrology was plain to the Latin ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... before my very eyes, made wholesome by the fires of patriotism, stalked the grim God of War. Knowing nothing yet of the motive that inspired these people, I could feel no enthusiasm, but only disillusionment at this discovery of the omnipotence of strife. ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... 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, ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent
... have comforted me much, and I have much to be grateful for; for after the rash attempt I made to secure my freedom, I have reason to be thankful for the mercy shown to me. Death—dreadful death of soul and body—would have been my portion; but, by the mercy of Omnipotence, I have been spared to repentance—John iii. I have now come to bitterness. The chaplain, a pious gentleman, says it never really pays to steal. "Lay up for yourselves treasures in Heaven, where neither ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke
... in detail, the purely modern fiction of the omnipotence of the State. The prince is to take everything into his charge, to maintain and restore churches and public buildings, to keep up the municipal police, to drain the marshes, to look after the supply of wine and corn; so to distribute ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... "Then can He make a stone so heavy that He can't lift it?" Many wide-awake grown-up people do not at once see a satisfactory answer. Yet the difficulty lies merely in the absurd, though cunning, form of the question, which really amounts to asking, "Can the Almighty destroy His own omnipotence?" It is somewhat similar to the other question, "What would happen if an irresistible moving body came in contact with an immovable body?" Here we have simply a contradiction in terms, for if there existed such a thing as an immovable body, there could not at ...
— The Canterbury Puzzles - And Other Curious Problems • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... whole, only broken by the dull sound of the falling avalanche or the shrill voice of the restless crow, was so evident and so powerful, and combined so impressively with the marvellous beauty of the surroundings, that the heart could not fail to recognise the sublimity of Nature and the omnipotence of ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... were measures which promised a more legal and constitutional system of government. The question of the divorce presented to More no serious difficulty. Untenable as Henry's claim seemed to the new Chancellor, his faith in the omnipotence of parliament would have enabled him to submit to any statute which named a new spouse as queen and her children as heirs to the crown. But as Cromwell's policy unfolded itself he saw that more ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 9 • Various
... whatsoever into the blue as a background with the abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The omnipotence of the moment ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... The Code Civil (art. 1895) makes the nominal value entirely conclusive; so, also, the Prussian Landrecht (I, 790): which is to proclaim the omnipotence and infallibility of the state power in the most ingenuous or else in the most brutal manner. The power given by Puchta to metallic value (Pandecten, VII, aufl., 38) is applicable neither to paper money nor to small coin; and it ignores entirely that stamped coins and currency ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher
... born on earth since his day, here live in bodily shape; and I have had the pleasure of meeting many admirable geniuses of the French, German, and English schools, and have seen some of their extraordinary works, which, for diversity of subject and majesty of conception, seem to rival omnipotence itself! ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... can scarce utter three or four words, but they faint away. Therefore, to comprehend much in a few words, the Voice is an Emanation from that very Spirit, which God breathed inth Man's Nostrils, when he Created him a living Soul. Hence also, The Word of God, the Son of God, the Omnipotence of God, &c. are in Holy Scripture oftentimes homonymous, or of the like, ...
— The Talking Deaf Man - A Method Proposed, Whereby He Who is Born Deaf, May Learn to Speak, 1692 • John Conrade Amman
... Anarchist philosophy in ancient Greece was Zeno (342-267 or 270 B.C.), from Crete, the founder of the Stoic philosophy, who distinctly opposed his conception of a free community without government to the state-Utopia of Plato. He repudiated the omnipotence of the state, its intervention and regimentation, and proclaimed the sovereignty of the moral law of the individual—remarking already that, while the necessary instinct of self-preservation leads man to egotism, nature has supplied a corrective to it by providing man with another instinct—that ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... flings the book aside because it warns him of what he affects to disbelieve and would be glad to forget. Magic wins him by its unknown possibilities 'of profit and delight, of power, of honour, and omnipotence'. ...
— The Growth of English Drama • Arnold Wynne
... excellent friend Dr. Bell would exclaim if he were here. That which, as he says, gives in a school to the master, the hundred eyes of Argus, and the hundred hands of Briareus, might in a state give omnipresence to law, and omnipotence to order. This is indeed the ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey
... her passionate heritage, was about to be shrouded away from the world she loved in the coif and robe of the cloistered nun. Gentle women: pure men; God's world! Why are the two first so unfitted for the last? To God we apply the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence. If these attributes be true, whence the evil that rules the world?—Is our God a demon? ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... at all, For gods and ghosts, yea, men and beasts, unto my power are thrall. I dare appeal to you, if I should look awry— Say, father, with your leave, in heaven who dares my word deny? And if I please to smile, who will not laugh outright? Whereby my great omnipotence is known to every wight. I make the noble love the bastard in degree; I tame and temper all the tongues that rail and scoff at me. What bird, what beast, what worm, but feeleth my delight? What lives or draweth breath, but[69] I can pleasure or ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. VI • Robert Dodsley
... its grandeur, testifies To His omnipotence who placed it there; The rushing, mighty torrent verifies His ceaseless working; and His constant care And kindliness is proven by the still And growing meadow, ...
— The Song of the Exile—A Canadian Epic • Wilfred S. Skeats
... attributes of God, one of the perfections which we contemplate in our idea of him, that there is no duality or opposition between his will and his vision, between the impulses of his nature and the events of his life. This is what we commonly designate as omnipotence and creation. Now, in the contemplation of beauty, our faculties of perception have the same perfection: it is indeed from the experience of beauty and happiness, from the occasional harmony between ...
— The Sense of Beauty - Being the Outlines of Aesthetic Theory • George Santayana
... impossible to do anything. Even men of eminence had often brought all their forces of wealth and argument against similar enterprises, and had failed in their opposition. What could a few score of peasants, and one poor ecclesiastic, do against all the omnipotence of Parliament, of millionaires, of secretaries of State, of speculators, of promoters, tenacious and forcible and ravenous as ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... on south to old age, we are going on south to eternal youth. It is the one who stops who "ages rapidly." Each day brings us a larger vision. Infinity, Eternity, Omnipotence, Omniscience ...
— The University of Hard Knocks • Ralph Parlette
... where the Bagers, as I already stated, imagine that death is total annihilation. The Mandingoes and Fullahs have their Islamism and its Koran; the Soosoo has his good spirits and bad; another nation has its "pray-men" and "book-men," with their special creeds; another relies on the omnipotence of juju priests and fetiche worship;[6] some believe in the immortality of spirit; while others confide in the absolute translation of body. The Mahometan tribes adore the Creator, with an infinitude of ablutions, genuflexions, prayers, fasts, and by strictly ...
— Captain Canot - or, Twenty Years of an African Slaver • Brantz Mayer
... Roman Church never canonises any human being, of whatever eminence his piety may have been, if it is not proved to its satisfaction that he had the power of altering the laws of nature, and availed himself of divine omnipotence in order to serve his friends, and even to satisfy their caprice. For example: one saint has been able to traverse the seas with no better vessel for his use than his own cloak; another used to bring down rain from heaven ...
— Roman Catholicism in Spain • Anonymous
... existence everything which he actually understands, for they think that they would thus destroy God's power. If, they contend, God had created everything which is in his intellect, he would not be able to create anything more, and this, they think, would clash with God's omnipotence; therefore, they prefer to asset that God is indifferent to all things, and that he creates nothing except that which he has decided, by some absolute exercise of will, to create. However, I think I have shown ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... question remain, the Apostle on the left confirms the judgment. No one can mistake what passes within him; like one transfixed in adoration, his uplifted eyes seem to ray out his soul, as if in recognition of the divine tribunal. But the overpowering thought of Omnipotence is now tempered by the human sympathy of his companion, whose open hands, connecting the past with the present, seem almost to articulate, "Alas, my brother!" By this exquisite turn, we are next brought to John, the gentle almoner of the Church, who is dealing out their portions to the ...
— Lectures on Art • Washington Allston
... are free, which suffices for us to acquire merit if we do right and demerit if we do wrong, and that this illusion of liberty is a relative liberty, which leaves the prescience of God, and therefore His omnipotence, absolute. Man is also extremely weak, debilitated, and incapable of good on account of original sin, the sin of our first parents, which is transmitted to us through heredity and paralyses us. But God helps us, and this is what is termed grace. He ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet
... we have accorded 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
... be? To go farther back still: Who knows what indelible constitution may be, is, fixed upon the individual organism, for better, for worse, by the authors of its life, that, if evil, no training, no education, no work of grace, not even omnipotence, can expunge or alter? This motherhood of woman, in its awful sanctity and mystery, in its bearings upon the immortality of personal identity, is a fearful dignity. Therein consists the first and chief claim of Woman to honor and reverence. She who has been a mother has measured ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 4, October, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... On his arrival he had established in the Duchy of Mecklenburg, in Swedish Pomerania, and in Stralsund, the capital of that province, military posts and custom-houses, and that in a time of profound peace with those countries, and without any previous declaration. The omnipotence of Napoleon, and the terror inspired by the name of Davoust, overcame all obstacles which might have opposed those iniquitous usurpations. The weak were forced to yield to ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... God, the Great, the Mighty, the Tremendous, the Merciful, the Gracious, the Benign, the Wise, the Faithful, the Just, and the Virtuous; Omniscience, Omnipresence, Omnipotence, are His alone, whose Being knew no beginning, and can know no ...
— Cole's Funny Picture Book No. 1 • Edward William Cole
... been quite fatal—if not to our lives, at least to our chances of reaching civilisation. Moreover, my people were not by any means without a kind of religion of their own. They believed in the omnipotence of a Great Spirit in whose hands their destinies rested; and him they worshipped with much the same adoration which Christians give to God. The fundamental difference was that the sentiment animating them was not love, but fear: propitiation ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... and decent wages, too. Ere long he visited more distant farms, And found his calling not devoid of charms. On Nature's varied face he still could gaze, And each new scene presented fresh displays Of God's Omnipotence and boundless love, Which raised his thoughts from Earth to things above. While, ever and anon, he found a friend To give him work, and press on him to spend The night, in comfort, 'neath his friendly ...
— The Emigrant Mechanic and Other Tales In Verse - Together With Numerous Songs Upon Canadian Subjects • Thomas Cowherd
... popular a nobleman." This assurance, assisted by the consolations of a firm trust in God, caused her to raise her head with a meek smile. He continued to speak of the impregnable hopes of the Christian who founds his confidence on Omnipotence; and while his words spread a serenity through her soul, that seemed the ministration of a descended saint, she closed her hands over her breast, and silently invoked the protection of the Almighty Jehovah for ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... differences. The insuperable barrier that divides England from Germany has grown out of circumstance and habit and thought. For many hundreds of years the German peoples have stood to arms in their own defence against the encroachments of successive empires; and modern Germany learned the doctrine of the omnipotence of force by prolonged suffering at the hands of the greatest master of that immoral school—the Emperor Napoleon. No German can understand the attitude of disinterested patronage which the English ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh
... organizations, and held the threads of multifarious interests, he was very human at bottom, and Smith liked him all the better for the glow of self-satisfaction that shone upon his face at this tribute to his omnipotence. ...
— Round the World in Seven Days • Herbert Strang
... put aside his fears; I live, with God ever before me. I recognize His omnipotence, I fear His anger; I acknowledge His love, too, His compassion and mercy towards all His creatures, He will never desert those who serve Him. If matters go according to His will they go according to mine; consequently nothing ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... so eloquent a fashion that almost we are persuaded to sympathize with him. Certainly his lines were hard, to have outlived his great deeds, and to hear his many inventions ascribed to the gods. The speech of the released Odin to Reidmar is modeled on Job's conception of omnipotence, and it is one of the memorable parts of this book. Gripir's prophecy, too, is a majestic work, and its original was three sentences in the saga and the poem Gripisspa in the heroic songs of the Edda. Here Morris rises to the heights ...
— The Influence of Old Norse Literature on English Literature • Conrad Hjalmar Nordby
... experience in life, as that "I have five millions," or, "I am the best-dressed woman in the church,—therefore I am somebody." The fact of self-consciousness would not have struck them as warranting a claim even to a good social position, much less to a share in omnipotence; they knew the trait only as a sign of bad manners. Yet there were at least two persons among the glorified chrysanthemums of St. John's Garden this day, who as the sermon closed and the organ burst out again, glanced ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... were giants on the earth in those days—giants that strove to scale heaven. The first woman's breast that heaved with life on this world yielded the daring which could contend with Omnipotence, the strength which could bear a thousand years of bondage, the vitality which could feed that vulture death through uncounted ages, the unexhausted life and uncorrupted excellence, sisters to immortality, which, after millenniums of crimes, struggles, and woes, could conceive and bring forth ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... than ever! See the Divine Sufferer in the terminating scenes of His own ignominy and woe. How patient!—"As a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He opened not His mouth." In these awful moments, outraged Omnipotence might have summoned twelve legions of angels and put into the hand of each a vial of wrath. But He submits in meek, majestic silence. Verily, in Him ...
— The Mind of Jesus • John R. Macduff
... that horror is of the myth, not of the creature. There are myriads lower than this, and more loathsome, in the scale of being; the links between dead matter and animation drift everywhere unseen. But it is the strength of the base element that is so dreadful in the serpent; it is the very omnipotence of the earth. That rivulet of smooth silver, how does it flow, think you? It literally rows on the earth, with every scale for an oar; it bites the dust with the ridges of its body. Watch it, when it moves slowly. ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... obtains, the enlargement of his comprehension and the elevation of his fancy; but this is rarely to be hoped by Christians from metrical devotion. Whatever is great, desirable, or tremendous, is comprised in the name of the Supreme Being. Omnipotence cannot be exalted; Infinity cannot be amplified; Perfection cannot ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... burgesses were moving incessantly 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 ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume V. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... cherished confidence in his word. He who has filled the volume of inspiration with "exceeding great and precious promises," will assuredly accomplish them, notwithstanding every apparent impediment. Omnipotence marches forward with a steady, undeviating step, to its predestined purpose; and that infinite wisdom which originally planned the future, can never be frustrated or confused by any contingencies or vicissitudes; for ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... 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 they should ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... of a double and mysterious nature, made up of dust and deity, now grovelling in the mire, then borne aloft to the skies,—the football of the eternal powers of good and evil, enslaved and yet to be emancipated, as we may hope, in the last and final struggle, when the soul is rescued by Omnipotence. ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... influence upon her own life. She had at first known of him only through the filthy, slanderous verses of such oligarchs as Catullus and Calvus; then through her lover she had come to look upon Caesar as an incarnation as it were of omniscience, omnipotence, and benevolence—the man for whom everything was worth sacrificing, from whom every noble thing ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... of men weep for us, the fatherland sighs, and Glory is in mourning. We struggle here against the oppression of the gods, and the longings of the nations are for us.... Adversity was wanting to my career. If I had died on the throne amidst the clouds of my omnipotence, I should have remained a problem for many men: to-day, thanks to misfortune, they can judge of me ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... before we thus dogmatize. That which we call miracle may be in perfect harmony with law that lies just beyond our knowledge. Omniscience seems to be a necessary qualification for such theorizing as asserts that miracles are violations of the laws of nature. Omnipotence is an essential attribute of the Ruler of the universe. But in order to its existence, the Infinite one must be above the laws which he has established, able to take hold of those laws and handle them as he sees proper, otherwise he is not all-powerful. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various
... The representative of omnipotence looked as if he had left most of these things to his subordinates; he passed a hand over his wrinkling brow and said in a voice much saner than any he had ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... later Addison, famed as a clear thinker and writer, thus wrote of justice: "There is no virtue so truly great and godlike as justice.... Omniscience and omnipotence are requisites for the full exercise of it." Almost in our own time Daniel Webster, called in his day the great expounder and even now reckoned among the greatest of men intellectually, in his eulogy upon Justice Story thus apostrophized justice: "Justice is the great ...
— Concerning Justice • Lucilius A. Emery
... replied he, and she said, "O boy, I will come to thee." So she gathered her skirts and making a spring, landed on the other side of the river by him; whereupon he drew near to her, wondering at her beauty and grace, and saw a form that the hand of Omnipotence had tanned with the leaves of the Jinn and which had been fostered by Divine solicitude, a form on which the zephyrs of fair fortune had blown and over whose creation favourable planets had presided. Then she called out to him, saying, "O Muslim, come and wrestle before ...
— The Book Of The Thousand Nights And One Night, Volume II • Anonymous
... proportion'd full." Next turning round to me with milder lip He spake: "This of the seven kings was one, Who girt the Theban walls with siege, and held, As still he seems to hold, God in disdain, And sets his high omnipotence at nought. But, as I told him, his despiteful mood Is ornament well suits the breast that wears it. Follow me now; and look thou set not yet Thy foot in the hot sand, but to the wood Keep ever close." Silently on ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante
... they watch me in the night; With eyes like moons. My gods are they; in each the evil grows, The grandiose evil darkens over each And each black god, silent Under the iron skies, dreams Of his omnipotence—the taciturn black gods! ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... that the true glory of the divine nature is its tenderness. The lowliness and death of Christ are the glory of God! Not in the awful attributes which separate that inconceivable Nature from us, not in the eternity of His existence, nor in the Infinitude of His Being, not in the Omnipotence of His unwearied arm, nor in fire-eyed Omniscience, but in the pity and graciousness which bend lovingly over us, is the true glory of God. These pompous 'attributes' are but the fringes of the brightness, the living white heart of which is love. God's glory is God's grace, and the purest expression ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... enemies setting a watch lest it should be taken away. But when the hour came which the Father had reserved in His own power, the angel of the Lord appeared and rolled away the stone from the tomb, and the watch fled, and at the summons of omnipotence life came ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 3 - Massillon to Mason • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 is ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... walking, and use my winter head as well as I can, which is not very well. I do not blame the winter, nor do I blame anything. But where are the red-hot irons and the youth of omnipotence? For hours sometimes I walk along a path in the woods with my hands folded on my back, an old man, my mind gilded for a moment by an occasional memory; I stop, and raise my eyebrows in surprise. Can this be an iron in the fire? It is ...
— Look Back on Happiness • Knut Hamsun
... to go home "by land," which, considering that the Great Western is his own road—his iron child, so to speak,—by which he is bound to swear under all circumstances, is, I think, a pretty good specimen of her omnipotence. ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... characterized Jefferson. It is true, he and the Gallic writers agreed upon certain fundamental propositions; but they were peculiar neither to him nor them. Some of the same principles were announced by Locke and Beccaria, by Hobbes, who maintained the omnipotence of the state, and by Grotius, who insisted upon the divine right of kings. To agree with another upon certain matters does not make one his disciple. No one mistakes the doctrines of Paul for those of Mohammed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... 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 some specialty before being hailed as omniscient; so Popinot's fate was sealed, and ...
— The Commission in Lunacy • Honore de Balzac
... Thus to a theist it will no doubt appear more conceivable that the Supreme Mind should be such that in some of its attributes it resembles the human mind, while in other of its attributes—among which he will place omnipresence, omnipotence, and directive agency—it transcends the human mind as greatly as the latter "transcends mechanical motion;" and therefore that although it is true, as a matter of logical terminology, that we ought to ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... 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
... line, on terrace terrace spread, To swell the heightening, brightening gradual mound, By marvellous structure climbing tow'rds the day. Each wrought alone, yet altogether wrought, Unconscious, not unworthy, instruments, By which a hand invisible was rearing A new creation in the secret deep. Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by them; Hence what Omnipotence alone could do, Worms did. I saw the living pile ascend. The mausoleum of its architects, Still dying upwards as their labours closed: Slime the material, but the slime was turn'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... are Thy servants blest, O Lord, How sure is their defence! Eternal Wisdom is their guide, Their help, Omnipotence! ...
— The Letters of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... had decided that Parliament was omnipotent—and Parliament, in its omnipotence, instead of trial by jury and the Habeas Corpus, enacted admiralty courts in England to try Americans for offenses charged against them as committed in America; instead of the privileges of Magna Charta, nullified the charter itself of Massachusetts Bay; shut up the port ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... been made a Marshal of France. While falling short of the absolute omnipotence of London's Provost-Marshal the position is not without ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, January 3, 1917 • Various
... pushed into the centre with their ponderous omnipotence, and even as they did so, Rupert Grant sprang forward with his incontrollable ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... imagine," said he, smiling. "The conditions of their theories, so far as even omniscience can comprehend or omnipotence realize them, are indeed exactly complied with; but nevertheless, they often baffle both. Sometimes the reproof, thus implied, obliquely strikes more than its immediate objects; it alights even on some of the profoundest philosophers, who never had it in their thoughts to call in question ...
— The Eclipse of Faith - Or, A Visit To A Religious Sceptic • Henry Rogers
... restless and the longing, Providence often appears to be worse than inscrutable: an unreliable Omnipotence given to haphazard whimsies in dealing with its own creatures, choosing at random some among them to be rent with tragic deprivations and others to be ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... discussing them fully. But from the 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 been supposed, a necessary outcome of ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... 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 consequences of ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... the absolute Principle of Scientific Mind-healing, the sovereign Omnipotence which delivers the children of men from pain, disease, decay, and every ill ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... hundred miles from London should have some interest, however slight, in international politics, and some knowledge, however fragmentary, of natural forces, rather than a slipshod belief in ghosts, witches, and the omnipotence of "squire." It is not from such minds that empire is made or deserved, and if with the increase of cheap schooling, cheap printing, and cheap travelling much that is beautiful in language or in legend is swept aside and forgotten, ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... is almost to be so; to determine upon attainment is frequently attainment itself. Thus earnest resolution has often seemed to have about it almost a savor of omnipotence.—Samuel Smiles. ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... pay his taxes; who could cherish Thoreau, and yet see all his limitations. Emerson affirmed more than he denied, and his charity was as broad as his judgment. He set Thoreau a good example in bragging, but he bragged to a better purpose. He exalted the present moment, the universal fact, the omnipotence of the moral law, the sacredness of private judgment; he pitted the man of to-day against all the saints and heroes of history; and, although he decried traveling, he was yet considerable of a traveler, ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... instance tolerably large, he re-established them on their pedestals. A relapse to 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 ...
— The Lords of the Ghostland - A History of the Ideal • Edgar Saltus
... wonderful the spectacle the manger offers, where shepherds bend their knees, and angels bend their eyes! Here is present, not the immortal, but the eternal; here is not one kind of matter united to another, or a spiritual to an earthly element, but the Creator to a creature, divine Omnipotence to human weakness, the Ancient of Days to the infant of a day. What deep secrets of divine wisdom, power, and love lie here, wrapped up in these poor swaddling-clothes! Mary holds in her arms, in this manger with its straw, what draws the wondering ...
— The Angels' Song • Thomas Guthrie
... 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 ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... measure of theological virtue may be twofold. One is taken from the very nature of virtue, and thus the measure and rule of theological virtue is God Himself: because our faith is ruled according to Divine truth; charity, according to His goodness; hope, according to the immensity of His omnipotence and loving kindness. This measure surpasses all human power: so that never can we love God as much as He ought to be loved, nor believe and hope in Him as much as we should. Much less therefore can there be excess in such things. Accordingly ...
— Summa Theologica, Part I-II (Pars Prima Secundae) - From the Complete American Edition • Saint Thomas Aquinas |
