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21 " God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. …To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true. "
― Elisabeth Elliot , Discipline: The Glad Surrender
22 " We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. how can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry?...We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God's problem?... But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.'... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference... How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? 'Oh, never mind...boys will be boys'. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian 'killing fields' or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice. "
― Rebecca Manley Pippert
23 " In the Bible, the opposite of Sin, with a capital 'S,' is not virtue - it's faith: faith in a God who draws all to himself in his resurrection. "
― Robert Farrar Capon , Between Noon & Three: Romance, Law & the Outrage of Grace
24 " No, I thought, growing more rebellious, life has its own laws and it is for me to defend myself against whatever comes along, without going snivelling to God about sin, my own or other people's. How would it profit a man if he got into a tight place, to call he people who put him there miserable sinners? Or himself a miserable sinner? I disliked the levelling aspect of this sinnerdom, it was like a cricket match played in a drizzle, where everybody had an excuse - and what a dull excuse! - for playing badly. Life was meant to test a man, bring out his courage, initiative, resource; and I longed, I thought, to be tested: I didn't want to fall on my knees and call myself a miserable sinner. But the idea of goodness did attract me, for I did not regard it as the opposite of sin. I saw it as something bright and positive and sustaining, like the sunshine, something to be adored, but from afar. "
― L.P. Hartley , The Go-Between
25 " Independence is counterfeit freedom. We think if we can make all our own choices and do our own thing, we will be free. But the opposite is true. By trying to be independent, we are attempting to take God’s place as the ruler of our lives. We can never succeed at creating happiness because we are the created, not the Creator. "
― Pauline Creeden , The Prodigal Life: Coming all the way home to God
26 " Love is the opposite of fear and it lights the flames of a million hearts. "
― Amy Leigh Mercree
27 " Love is the opposite of fear. It is free and transcends all space and time. Love is infinite. "
― Amy Leigh Mercree , Joyful Living: 101 Ways to Transform Your Spirit and Revitalize Your Life
28 " Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you invert the equation - expectation divided by reality - you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope. "
― Jodi Picoult , Nineteen Minutes
29 " You see, nothing matters except pleasure - which is the opposite of happiness, its tragic part, I expect. "
― Lawrence Durrell , The Alexandria Quartet (The Alexandria Quartet #1-4)
30 " Mumbai is the sweet, sweaty smell of hope, which is the opposite of hate; and it's the sour, stifled smell of greed, which is the opposite of love. It's the smell of Gods, demons, empires, and civilizations in resurrection and decay. Its the blue skin-smell of the sea, no matter where you are in the island city, and the blood metal smell of machines. It smells of the stir and sleep and the waste of sixty million animals, more than half of them humans and rats. It smells of heartbreak, and the struggle to live, and of the crucial failures and love that produces courage. It smells of ten thousand restaurants, five thousand temples, shrines, churches and mosques, and of hunderd bazaar devoted exclusively to perfume, spices, incense, and freshly cut flowers. That smell, above all things - is that what welcomes me and tells me that I have come home. Then there were people. Assamese, Jats, and Punjabis; people from Rajasthan, Bengal, and Tamil Nadu; from Pushkar, Cochin, and Konark; warrior caste, Brahmin, and untouchable; Hindi, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Jain, Parsee, Animist; fair skin and dark, green eyes and golden brown and black; every different face and form of that extravagant variety, that incoparable beauty, India. "
― Gregory David Roberts , Shantaram
31 " Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species. "
― Friedrich Nietzsche , The Gay Science
32 " I have to go," I say, helpless.What makes you say the opposite of what every cell in your body wants you to say? "
33 " Rem tene, verba sequentur: grasp the subject, and the words will follow. This, I believe, is the opposite of what happens with poetry, which is more a case of verba tene, res sequenter: grasp the words, and the subject will follow. "
― Umberto Eco , Postscript to the Name of the Rose
34 " Living is the opposite of poetry. Poetry is the recollection of living, or, more often than not, the lament of having not lived. Or worse yet, merely the contemplation of living. My advice to you, Ms. Harper, is this: Live. And keep living. And never stop to look back to write about what you have lived and observed and overcome, lest you turn into a pillar of salt. This desert life is already full of such monoliths. "
― P.S. Baber , Cassie Draws the Universe
35 " Doubt isn't the opposite of faith "
36 " What was the opposite of linkage blindness? What described being certain of something without any kind of evidence?. "
37 " Take faith, for example. For many people in our world, the opposite of faith is doubt. The goal, then, within this understanding, is to eliminate doubt. But faith and doubt aren't opposites. Doubt is often a sign that your faith has a pulse, that it's alive and well and exploring and searching. Faith and doubt aren't opposites, they are, it turns out, excellent dance partners. "
― Rob Bell , What We Talk about When We Talk about God
38 " Addressing the concept of man made additions to the faith - “These additions-standards, practices, and allegiances supposedly created for our spiritual benefit-have had the opposite effect. "
― Ed Galisewski , A Simpler Faith: Hope For Those Who Struggle With Church
39 " Maladict had hallucinations, but Wazzer had a certainty you could bend steel around. It was the opposite of a hallucination, somehow. It was as if she could see what was real and you couldn't. "
40 " The opposite of faith isn’t doubt. The opposite of faith is certainty. "
― Claudia Gray , Defy the Stars (Constellation, #1)