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“One of the earliest attempts to portray the human embodiment of the divine was made by the ancient Hindus a few centuries before the Christian era. In the ancient Hindu scriptures, the sacred hymns called the Vedas, the god Indra wandered about in many forms, sometimes as a bull and sometimes as a ram, and the god Varuna is said to have come out of the point of an arrow and appeared as a bull. [...] The Sanskrit terms used to express the manifestation of God coming into this world evolved from rupa, vapus, and tanu, to pradurbhava (appearance), and gradually there came about the Sanskirt word avatara, composed of two parts, the verb root tr, meaning pass or cross, and the prefix ava, signifying down. The finite verb form avatarati means 'he descends'. This passing, crossing, or coming down is symbolic of the passage of God from eternity into the temporal realm, from unconditioned to conditioned, from infinitude to finitude the descent of the divine to our world. A variant of the word avatara is the Sanskrit word avatarana, a term used to describe the entry of an actor upon the stage making his appearance from behind a curtain, just as the God-man manifests himself upon the world-stage coming down from heaven. The Anglicization of the Sanskrit term avatara is the word avatar, the word designated to describe the advent of the divine, God appearing on earth.”
― Daniel E. Bassuk, Incarnation in Hinduism and Christianity: The Myth of the God-Man

“The general argument from the contingent to the absolute, or from the conditioned to the unconditioned, is a powerful and cogent one. No attempt, philosophical or otherwise, to show that it is a confused argument, or logically insufficient, or susceptible of some purely physical answer has ever been impressively successful. Even if one does not accept its conclusions one still has absolutely no rational warrant for believing that materialism has any sort of logical superiority over theism; the classical argument is strong enough to show that naturalism is far and away a weaker, more incomplete, and more willfully doctrinaire position than classical theism is. Naturalism, as I have said repeatedly, is a philosophy of the absurd, of the just-there-ness of what is certainly by its nature a contingent reality; it is, simply enough, an absurd philosophy.”
― David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God : Being, Consciousness, Bliss

“as soon as want and suffering permit rest to a man, ennui is at once so near that he necessarily requires diversion," —i. e., more suffering. Even if the socialist Utopia were attained, innumerable evils would be left, because some of them —like strife — are essential to life; and if every evil were removed, and strife were altogether ended, boredom would become as intolerable as pain.”
― Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy

“According to Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine, human reason has the capacity to penetrate what being is in itself. Philosophy would be, first and foremost, a theory of being as being, an ontology, taken in its broadest sense, as a synonym for metaphysics, the only study capable of offering us the foundations of particular knowledge, both on the speculative and practical levels, that is, of the sciences and ethics, aesthetics and history. All sciences would be conditioned by metaphysics as their primary explanation. This highlights the radical difference between the positivist point of view, which reduces philosophy to a knowledge of phenomena, and the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding, which presents philosophy as possible knowledge of the thing in itself, of “being as being”, according to Aristotle's succinct statement in his Metaphysics.”
― Miguel Reale, Introdução à Filosofia