Universalism Quotes

“While we are threading our way through the vagaries of life, our shortage of reciprocity and solidarity may corner us into breaches of culpability. We can eschew this and kindle a dream of universalism that does not impose itself but emerges from the world's numerous cultural and topical particularities and enable us to compare, discern, and identify, allowing us to marvel at the diversity. In this way, we can embrace universal recognition, human understanding, peace of mind, and compassion with others and with ourselves. (" I only needed a light ")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“This much is certain, that we have no theological right to set any sort of limits to the loving-kindness of God which has appeared in Jesus Christ. Our theological duty is to see and understand it as being still greater than we had seen before.”
― Karl Barth, The Humanity of God

“The language of intrinsic human rights represented a significant advance beyond the previous language of world religions in terms of its universal applicability and its thiswordliness.”
― Immanuel Wallerstein

“As far as I am concerned, anyone who hopes for the universal reconciliation of all creatures with God must already believe that this would be the best possible ending to the Christian story; and such a person has then no excuse for imagining that God could bring any but the best possible ending to pass without thereby being in some sense a failed creator.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“[I suspect] that in the drive toward the liberal universalist notion of human rights that characterized the last fifty or so years, there has been an accompanying oversensitivity that, in practice, keeps us atomized and more likely to be manipulated and have our rights impinged upon.”
― Darren O'Donnell, Social Acupuncture

“The universality of moral concern is not something we learn by being universal but by being particular. Because we know what it is to be a parent, loving our children, not children in general, we understand what it is for someone else, somewhere else, to be a parent, loving his or her children, not ours. There is no road to human solidarity that does not begin with moral particularity - by coming to know what it means to be a child, a parent, a neighbour, a friend. We learn to love humanity by loving specific human beings. There is no short-cut.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbor as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, traveling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father?”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

“Who, after all, is saying something more objectively atrocious, or more aggressively perverse? The person who claims that every newborn infant enters the world justly under the threat of eternal dereliction, and that a good God imposes or permits the imposition of a state of eternal agony on finite, created rational beings as part of the mystery of his love or sovereignty or justice? Or the person who observes that such ideas are cruel and barbarous and depraved? Which of these two should really be, if not ashamed of his or her words, at least hesitant, ambivalent, and even a little penitent in uttering them? And which has a better right to moral indignation at what the other has said? And, really, don’t these questions answer themselves?

A belief does not merit unconditional reverence just because it is old, nor should it be immune to being challenged in terms commensurate to the scandal it seems to pose. And the belief that a God of infinite intellect, justice, love, and power would condemn rational beings to a state of perpetual torment, or would allow them to condemn themselves on account of their own delusion, pain, and anger, is probably worse than merely scandalous. It may be the single most horrid notion the religious imagination has ever conceived, and the most irrational and spiritually corrosive picture of existence possible. And anyone who thinks that such claims are too strong or caustic, while at the same time finding the traditional notion of a hell of everlasting suffering perfectly unobjectionable, needs to consider whether he or she is really thinking clearly about the matter at all.

(from Public Orthodoxy, “In Defense of a Certain Tone of Voice” )”
― David Bentley Hart

“Love is boundless, love is limitless, love is conditionless. People have made a mess of this world, because they place barriers around love - because they have raised walls and imprisoned the most universal lifegiving force of the world behind those walls.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Servitude is Sanctitude

“Sonnet of Enlightenment

World is born when individual is born.
Individual is born when collectivity is realized.
Collectivity is realized when selfishness is erased.
Selfishness is erased when love is universalized.
Love is universalized when separation is destroyed.
Separation is destroyed when superstition is crushed.
Superstition is crushed when reason is nourished.
Reason is nourished when correction is desired.
Correction is desired when ignorance is recognized.
Ignorance is recognized when arrogance is abolished.
Arrogance is abolished when humility is fostered.
Humility is fostered when simplicity is habit.
Simplicity is habit when awareness awakens.
Awareness awakens when expansion awakens.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Giants in Jeans: 100 Sonnets of United Earth

“There’s no shortage of problems with the human race, yet vegans decide to prioritize animals over humanity. Others prioritize exotic minorities over everything else. People need to get their priorities straight. Focus on what’s important, not on what you are personally, subjectively into. You can’t turn humanity’s future into your love of pets, or your gender confusion, or whatever. It’s not about you. It’s about humanity.”
― David Sinclair, Without the Mob, There Is No Circus

“When one abdicates universality, one obtains universal horror.”
― Alain Badiou, Theory of the Subject

“The abstraction of man gives rise to institutions that subsequently fail to function, for man is not abstract.”
― Isaiah Senones

“To say that histories and geographies affect us is trivial. To say that they determine us is false.”
― Susan Neiman, Left Is Not Woke

“The men on the plain at Shinar make a technological discovery... As after so many other technological advances, they immediately conclude that they now have the power of gods. They are no longer subject to nature. They have become its masters. They will storm the heavens. Their man-made environment - the city with its ziggurat or artificial mountain - will replicate the structure of the cosmos, but here they will rule, not God. It is a supreme act of hubris, committed time and again in history - from the Sumerian city-states, to Plato's Republic, to empires, ancient and modern, to the Soviet Union. It is the attempt to impose a man-made unity on divinely created diversity. That is what is wrong with universalism.”
― Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations

“The gospel excludes none who do not exclude themselves.”
― Matthew Henry, Matthew Henry's Commentary on the Whole Bible-Book of Colossians

“I am a living representation of my species - I am not owned by any one culture, but all cultures live through me - I am not owned by any one belief system, but all belief systems are part of me - I am not owned by any one school of thought, but all schools of thought are born in me. However, at the same time I must admit, I have more ignorance than knowledge - I have had more failures than successes - I have had more impediments than aids - but my sight has always been wider than my abilities permit - and that's the reason why I exist as a beacon of universalism on the face of earth.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Ain't Enough to Look Human

“He illuminates the landscape of society with an intense, ultra sensitive light and brings out a strange, hyperreal relief - a coherent reading, precisely like the light of a laser.

The local is a shabby thing. There's nothing worse than bringing us back down to our own little corner, our own territory, the radiant promiscuity of the face to face. A culture which has taken the risk of the universal, must perish by the universal.

Exile always offers a marvellous - pathetic or dramatic - distance, a distance which aids judgement, a serenity orphaned by its own world. Deterritorialization, on the other hand, is a demented deprivation. It is like a lobotomy. It has in it something of agony, of the inconstancy and disconnection of circuits.

You need an infinite stretch of time ahead of you to start to think, infinite energy to make the smallest decision. The world is getting denser. The immense number of useless projects is bewildering. Too many things have to be put in to balance up an uncertain scale. You can't disappear any more. You die in a state of total indecision.

A frenzy of indifference in these times of 'speed'. In the same way as you can counter the acceleration of your molecules with an iced drink, you have to head off artificial euphoria by pulling on the brake of melancholy.
Science and technologies could have become extensions of our human faculties, as MacLuhan wanted. Instead, they have devoured them. They have become sarcastic, like the laugh of the same name which devours flesh or like the creatures on the banks of the Styx which destroy the substance of the mental faculties.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“In essence, everything and everyone is made up of the same universal energy: you, me, the chair I’m sitting on, the trees and birds I can see outside my window, the guy from Amazon that just dropped off a package at my door and the package he delivered. Everything is connected, everything is part of this universal life force, everything is made up of the same stuff.”
― Saskia Lightstar, The Cancer Misfit: A Guide to Navigating Life After Treatment

“The universal thought is that the truth is one and there is no second thought about that.”
― Aiyaz Uddin

“In all groups and assemblies of men there are good and there are bad men. It is unprofitable to generalize. There are good Russians and bad Russians just as there are good Germans and bad Germans and good Englishmen and bad Englishmen. I mean that the distribution of what Reverend Mother Auxilia would call the grace of God cannot be charted geographically.”
― Bruce Marshall, Vespers in Vienna

“Religion is the manifestation of one’s own Real or Divine Self and it takes place automatically in a man and it makes him God. Universalism starts. The human race will see Him within and they shall announce “Thou art God”. This is religion or in the language of the philosophers, the evolution of the Life Power and thousands bear its proof.”
― Sri Jibankrishma or Diamond

“God is not good in the way a finite being might or might not be good, but is instead infinite Goodness as such; or that he is not merely something true, but is rather Truth in its transcendent fullness; or that he is not something beautiful, but is instead absolute Beauty; or that he is not a discrete unified thing, but is rather the transcendent Unity in which all reality subsists; or that he is not a discrete being among other beings, but is himself infinite subsistent Being as such, whereon all things depend.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“Redemption, then, if there is such a thing, must consist ultimately in a conversion of the heart so complete that one comes to see heaven for what it is—and thus also comes to see, precisely where one formerly had perceived only the fires of hell, the transfiguring glory of infinite love. And “love never fails” (1 Corinthians 13:8).”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“the God of eternal retribution and pure sovereignty proclaimed by so much of Christian tradition is not, and cannot possibly be, the God of self-outpouring love revealed in Christ.”
― David Bentley Hart, That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation

“The alternative to universalism is not an extreme individualism. Any possible, and certainly any desirable, human life is social.”
― J.L. Mackie, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong

“For with the vessel, and with the dissipation into smoke of the treasure it contains, it is he, the subject, the anonymous bearer, the herald, who is equally shattered.”
― Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

“Or let us posit that it is incumbent upon us to found a materialism of grace through the strong, simple idea that every existence can one day be seized by what happens to it and subsequently devote itself to that which is valid for all, or as Paul magnificently puts it, 'become all things to all men'.”
― Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

“Just as love is the general power of self-love turned toward everyone as the construction of living thought, similarly, hope weaves the subjectivity of salvation, of the unity of thought and power, as a universality that is present in each ordeal, each victory. Each victory won, however localized, is universal.”
― Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism

“But touching her corpse outwardly, they perceived it to be a woman's and, full of astonishment, they praised Christ, who kindleth the fire of His Love in all mankind, men and women, old men and youths and children.”
― A J and Albertus Schwengler: Wensinck, Legends of Eastern Saints Chiefly from Syriac Sources. Volume 1: Archelides; Volume 2: Hilaria. Bound with: Eusebii Pamphilii Historiae Ecclesiasticae Lib X, Ed A Schwegler.