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For this is the great secret, which was known to all educated men in our day: that by what men think, we create the world around us, daily new.
these Romans counted their lineage through the male line, rather than sensibly through the mother; it was silly, for how could any man ever know precisely who had fathered any woman’s child? Of course, these Romans made a great matter of worrying over who lay with their women, and locked them up and spied on them. Not that Igraine needed watching; one man was bad enough, who would want others who might be worse?
“The Christians seek to blot out all wisdom save their own; and in that strife they are banishing from this world all forms of mystery save that which will fit into their religious faith.
In our world, Igraine, there is room enough for many Gods and many Goddesses. But in the universe of the Christians—how can I say this?—there is no room for our vision or our wisdom. In their world there is one God alone; not only must he conquer over all Gods, he must make it as if there were no other Gods, had never been any Gods but only false idols, the work of their Devil.
If you seek to avoid your fate or to delay suffering, it only condemns you to suffer it redoubled in another life.
“You will not speak so of the God of my husband, who is a God of love.” “You say so. And yet he has made war upon all other Gods, and slain those who will not worship him,” Viviane said. “Such love we might well pray to be spared in a God.
death is always the gateway to new life and further wisdom, and although I did not know Ambrosius well, I like to think he is now learning, at the feet of his God, what true wisdom can be. What wise God would consign a man to Hell for ignorance, instead of teaching him better in the afterlife?”
We are both in her hands, and it is too late to say it would have been better the other way . . . she will do with us as she will.”
a God who chose to keep men and women with their thoughts on Heaven rather than on this world, which had been given to them for learning and growing in spirit, seemed alien to her,
the knowledge that they really lived that way, that any force calling itself divine could prefer barrenness to fruitfulness—that seemed to her a terrible betrayal of the very forces which gave life to the world.
I came to see that my quarrel was never with the Christ, but with his foolish and narrow priests who mistook their own narrowness for his.
love could never be weighed out or measured, so much for this one and so much for that, but was an endless and eternal flow, that the more she loved, the more love she had to give, as she gave it now to everyone,
I must believe that man has the power to know the right, to choose between good and evil and know that his choice has made a difference . . .”
My love for you is a prayer, she thought. Love is the only prayer I know.
