Immutability Quotes

“When God is our Holy Father, sovereignty, holiness, omniscience, and immutability do not terrify us; they leave us full of awe and gratitude. Sovereignty is only tyrannical if it is unbounded by goodness; holiness is only terrifying if it is untempered by grace; omniscience is only taunting if it is unaccompanied by mercy; and immutability is only torturous if there is no guarantee of goodwill.”
― Ravi Zacharias

“Pure sensism leads inevitably to universal doubt; if reality is in the end reducible to sensible appearance, then, since this is in a state of perpetual flux and self-contradiction, no kind of certitude will any longer be possible. [...] Truth is necessary and immutable; but in the sensible order nothing necessary or immutable is to be found; therefore sensible things will never yield us any truth.”
― Étienne Gilson

“We say that a human being is a person and a distinctive, fixed self with a name and a life. He has an identity. But what is this self really made of, except from the basic elements such as hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, phosphorus etc. and their subatomic particles? If a person is a specific, static, unchanged entity and existence, then what if an accident or a disease completely alters his body features? What if fear or madness changes his thoughts and perceptions? If dementia takes away his memories, or if drugs alter his emotions? And what if life circumstances, good or bad luck, modify his motives, his plans and his desires? Is it still the person we say he is? Or is selfhood a ghost, a useful fiction of the brain? An ever-shifting kaleidoscope of thoughts, feelings and perceptions? Flashes of hopes and desires? A bundle of alternating opinions and ideologies, of conflicting instincts and urges? If we take away all these from him, what would be left behind? If every drop of the ocean evaporates, is not the whole ocean gone? The immutable selfhood is a very old illusion and the last of illusions we ‘re going to abandon; if we ever will…”
― Giannis Delimitsos, A PHILOSOPHICAL KALEIDOSCOPE: Thoughts, Contemplations, Aphorisms

“Divine impassibility is not some arbitrary invention, due to the quirkiness of theologians, but it points instead to the intensely mysterious character of God. Understanding even a little of such grandeur taxes our minds, and stretches our thinking, leading us to use language that Scripture itself uses- negative language, to say what God is not, and metaphorical language to portray the ways that God deals with us in creation and redemption, and stretched language to attempt to do justice to God's supreme eminence".”
― Richard C. Barcellos, Confessing the Impassible God: The Biblical, Classical, & Confessional Doctrine of Divine Impassibility

“Entre rois, entre peuples, entre particuliers, le plus fort se done des droits sur le plus faible, et la même règle est suivie par les animaux, par la matière, par les èlèments, etc., de sorte que tout s'exècute dans l'univers par la violence; et cet ordre, que nous blâmons avec quelque apparance de justice, est la loi la plus gènèrale, la plus absolue, la plus immuable, et la plus ancienne de la nature.”
― Vauvenargues, Réflexions et Maximes

“I seek heavenly steadfastness in earthly monotony.”
― Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South

“It is divine simplicity that enables Christians to meaningfully confess that God is most absolute in his existence and attributes. adherents to this doctrine reason that of God were composed of parts in any sense he would be dependent upon those parts for his very being and thus the parts would be ontologically prior to him. If this were the case he would not be most absolute, that is, wholly self-sufficient and the first principle of all other things. Thus, only if God is "without parts" can he be "most absolute." God without parts, pg. 9-10”
― James E. Dolezal

“A person who takes responsibility of his life believes in the immutability of laws that govern this world. When we fail to achieve our desired fruit, it is because we failed to sow the right seed in the right soil at the right time.”
― Awdhesh Singh, 31 Ways to Happiness

“This ground-plan, conceived by a great architect, exhibits a fundamental metaphysical dualism in Plato’s thought. [...]
In politics, it is the opposition between the one collective, the state, which may attain perfection and autarchy, and the great mass of the people—the many individuals, the particular men who must remain imperfect and dependent, and whose particularity is to be suppressed for the sake of the unity of the state (see the next chapter). And this whole dualist philosophy, I believe, originated from the urgent wish to explain the contrast between the vision of an ideal society, and the hateful actual state of affairs in the social field—the contrast between a stable society, and a society in the process of revolution.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato