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1 " Job’s attitude in accusing God is opposite to that of his friends, who, in assuming the hypocritical role of defenders of God, defended, without knowing it, Satan’s right to an unlimited dominion. Like most defenders of the status quo, in wishing to justify the legitimate character of the present condition of humanity, they gave an absolute value to the legal situation, projecting it on to the very nature of God. In this wrong perspective, the different levels of human, demonic, angelic, and divine reality, bound up in the complex and shifting economy of salvation, are telescoped together, welded together and crystallized in a single vision of a God-Necessity, comparable to the inexorable and impersonal Fate of Greek paganism. They speak solely of the God of the Law, but not the God of the Promise… But Job aimed higher than his friends, for he believed the Promise, without which the Law would have been a monstrous absurdity and the God of the Old Testament could not have been the God of Christians. "
― Vladimir Lossky , In the Image and Likeness of God
2 " When the cyclical law of repetition suddenly stops its rotating movement, creation, freed from vanity, will not be absorbed into the impersonal Absolute of a Nirvana but will see the beginning of an eternal springtime, in which all the forces of life, triumphant over death, will come to the fulness of their unfolding, since God will be the only principle of life in all things. Then the deified will shine like stars around the only Star, Christ, with whom they will reign in the same glory of the Holy Trinity, communicated to each without measure by the Holy Spirit. "
3 " The divine persons do not assert themselves, but one bears witness to another. It is for this reason that St. John of Damascus said that 'the Son is the image of the Father, and the Spirit the image of the Son.' It follows that the third person of the Trinity is the only one not having his image in another person. The Holy Spirit, as person, remains unmanifested, hidden, concealing himself in his very appearing...The Holy Spirit is the sovereign unction upon the Christ and upon all the Christians called to reign with him in the Age to come. It is then that this divine person, now unknown, not having his image in another member of the Trinity, will manifest himself in deified persons: for the multitude of the saints will be his image. "
― Vladimir Lossky
4 " This category of divine risk, which is proper to a personal God freely creating personal beings endowed with freedom, is foreign to all abstract conceptions of the divine dominion - to the rationalist theology which thinks it exalts the omnipotence of the living God in attributing to him the perfections of a lifeless God who is incapable of being subject to risk. But he who takes no risk does not love… God’s dominion must be thought of in these terms of God’s personal love... "
5 " The person is the highest creation of God only because God gives it the possibility of love, therefore of refusal. "
― Vladimir Lossky , Orthodox Theology: An Introduction
6 " The love of God for man is so great that it cannot constrain; for there is no love without respect. Divine will always will submit itself to gropings, to detours, even to revolts of human will to bring it to a free consent: of such is divine providence, and the classical image of the pedagogue must seem feeble indeed to anyone who has felt God as a beggar of love waiting at the soul’s door without ever daring to force it. "
