Lucis Trust / Service Activities / Triangles / Bulletin / Recent Issues / March 2008 / Musings on Reverence  

Musings on Reverence

The One who rules over every source,
in whom the world coheres and dissolves,
the Lord, giver of blessings, adorable God —
by revering him one goes to peace forever.
The Upanishads

The moment I have realized God sitting in the temple of every human body, the moment I stand in reverence before every human being and see God in him—that moment I am free from bondage, everything that binds vanishes, and I am free.
Swami Vivekananda

Two things draw me to reverence: the starry heaven above and the moral law within.
Immanuel Kant

He who knows God reverences Him.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The most elementary ethical principle, when understood by the heart, means that out of reverence for the unfathomable, infinite, and living Reality we call God, we must never consider ourselves strangers toward any human being. Rather, we must bind ourselves to the
task of sharing his experiences and try being of help to him.
Albert Schweitzer

Reverence for the Eternal trains men to be wise.
And to be humble is the way to honor.
Proverbs

Revere the Maker; fetch thine eye
Up to his style, and manners of the sky.
Not of adamant and gold
Built he heaven stark and cold;
No, but a nest of bending reeds,
Flowering grass and scented weeds.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ethics is nothing else than reverence for life.
Albert Schweitzer

God sent his Singers upon earth
With songs of sadness and mirth,
That they might touch the hearts of men,
And bring them back to heaven again.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The more completely a man lives, the more largely alive he is in every part of him—in brain, and heart, and hands—the more completely he will comprehend the magnitude of life, and stand in reverence before the Power that moves and governs it.
Phillips Brooks

After the lights of inspirations have rayed out and their mysteries have been deposited, do not seek their continuance, for you have in God one who enables you to dispense with everything; but nothing enables you to dispense with God.
Ibn’ Ata’Illah

God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Thou knowest my tongue, O God,
Fain would it bring a precious gift—
The songs thou makest me sing!
Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Reverence for God is the thread upon which the various good qualities of men are strung like pearls. When this string is severed, the pearls scatter in all directions and are lost one by one.
Judah Ibn Kalaaz