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Viewed systematically, religion can be differentiated from other culturally constituted institutions by virtue only of its reference to superhuman beings.
Oct 2, 2025
Air is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy.... aerial joy is freedom.
It has been said by many great Christians that prayer is our secret weapon. If we desire to be free from every enemy stronghold over our lives and fully fortified to live the superhuman existences God intended us to live, then we must learn how to pray.
With better vision, we sacrifice for students for whom that sacrifice will most likely pay off. I'm sorry to say this, but there are times when even superhuman effort will not save a child from his environment or himself. It's not the job of the teacher to save a child's soul; it is the teachers' job to provide an opportunity for the child to save his own soul.
Children do not need superhuman, perfect parents. They have always managed with good enough parents: the parents they happened to have.
An actor must interpret life, and in order to do so must be willing to accept all the experiences life has to offer. In fact, he must seek out more of life than life puts at his feet. In the short span of his lifetime, an actor must learn all there is to know, experience all there is to experience, or approach that state as closely as possible. He must be superhuman in his efforts to store away in the core of his subconscious everything that he might be called upon to use in the expression of his art.
To err is human; to admit it, superhuman.
Is not every action of Hamlet induced by a fanatical impulse, which tells him that duty consists in revenge alone? And dose it need superhuman efforts to recognize that revenge never can be duty? I say again that Hamlet thinks much, but that he is by no means wise.
The superhuman power which exhiliration and hypnosis bring to a dancer is shown especially clearly in his almost inconceivable staying powers in a state of high tension. "In the dance even the weakest can do wonders."
The fearful danger of the present time is that above the cry for authority, we forget that man stands alone before the ultimate authority, and that anyone who lays violent hands on man here, is infringing eternal laws, and taking upon himself superhuman authority, which will eventually crush him.
Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.
Sincere thought, real free thought, ready, in the name of superhuman authority or of humble common sense, to question the basis of what is officially taught and generally accepted, is less and less likely to thrive. It is, we repeat, by far easier to enslave a literate people than an illiterate one, strange as this may seem at first sight. And the enslavement is more likely to be lasting.
How astonishingly does the chance of leaving the world improve a sense of its natural beauties upon us. Like poor Falstaff, although I do not 'babble,' I think of green fields; I muse with the greatest affection on every flower I have know from my infancy - their shapes and colours are as new to me as if I had just created them with superhuman fancy.
Superhuman effort isn't worth a damn unless it achieves results.
The paradox in Christian truth is invariably due to the fact that it is the truth that exists for God. The standard of measure and the end is superhuman; and there is only one relationship possible: faith.
The term 'charisma' will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a 'leader.
...the first casualty (of this crisis) had been the United Nations. It would need an immense effort, an almost superhuman effort, to restore the prestige of that organization
People were buying milk, or filling their cars with petrol, or even posting letters. And what no one else knew was the appalling weight of the thing they were carrying inside. The superhuman effort it took sometimes to be normal, and a part of things that appeared both easy and everyday. The loneliness of that.
Great occasions rally great principles, and brace the mind to a lofty bearing, a bearing that is even above itself. But trials that make no occasion at all, leave it to show the goodness and beauty it has in its own disposition. And here precisely is the superhuman glory of Christ as a character, that He is just as perfect, exhibits just as great a spirit in little trials as in great ones.
I think James Bond is a spy. He's not superhuman. Calling him a superhero is like calling James Bond movies "comic-book movies."
The mask can be a limitation, but you just deal with it. You do get superhuman strength and pumpkin bombs and all this other stuff to express yourself with.'
Knowing Chris Bennett's Writing as I do, I expected Only Superhuman to have an imaginative plot and a compelling superheroine in Emry Blair. What I hadn't expected was for the backstory to make so much sense. Usually science is the first causality of superhero stories, tossed aside with the breezy rationalization: 'Hey, it's comics!' Only Superhuman is, to my knowledge, the first hard science superhero story. And the Story is the better for it.
I don't think the emergence of a superhuman intelligence would be at all catastrophic but much more likely to be beneficial - just as long as we don't start trying to interfere with it!
He who was Shri Rama, whose stream of love flowed with resistless might even to the Chandala (the outcaste); Oh, who ever was engaged in doing good to the world though superhuman by nature, whose renown there is none to equal in the three worlds, Sita's beloved, whose body of Knowledge Supreme was covered by devotion sweet in the form of Sita. (part of A Hymn To Shri Ramakrishna)
You know, women are burdened with all this other crap all the time, like looking good. You need to be really superhuman to be successful as a woman.
When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.
A revolutionary career does not lead to banquets and honorary titles, interesting research and professorial wages. It leads to misery, disgrace, ingratitude, prison and a voyage into the unknown, illuminated by only an almost superhuman belief.
Astronauts are not superhuman. They lead ordinary lives and have varied personalities.
... by far the most astonishing guitar player ever has got to be Django Reinhardt ... Django was quite superhuman, There's nothing normal about him as a person or a player.
It is my assumption that growth in faith is the root of all spiritual growth and is prior to all disciplines of works. True spirituality is not a superhuman religiosity; it is simply true humanity released from bondage to sin and renewed by the Holy Spirit. This is given to us as we grasp by faith the full content of Christ's redemptive work: freedom from the guilt and power of sin, and newness of life through the indwelling and outpouring of his Spirit.
Engineers are not superhuman. They make mistakes in their assumptions, in their calculations, in their conclusions. That they make mistakes is forgivable; that they catch them is imperative. Thus it is the essence of modern engineering not only to be able to check one's own work but also to have one's work checked and to be able to check the work of others.
Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?
There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
We live in a world where great incompatibles co-exist: the human scale and the superhuman scale, stability and mobility, permanence and change, identity and anonymity, comprehensibility and universality.
The dual substance of Christ - the yearning, so human, so superhuman, of man to attain God. [...] has always been a deep inscrutable mystery to me. [...] My principle anguish and source of all my joys and sorrows from my youth onward has been the incessant, merciless battle between the spirit and the flesh. [...] And my soul is the arena where these two armies have clashed and met.
I'm always amazed that people take what I say seriously. I don't even take what I am seriously.
I never saw anyone like Ty Cobb. No one even close to him as the greatest all-time ballplayer. That guy was superhuman, amazing.
Slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or the taste of the superhuman, cripple judgment. On the day when crime puts on the apparel of innocence, through a curious reversal peculiar to our age, it is innocence that is called on to justify itself. The purpose of this essay is to accept and study that strange challenge.
When all the mysticism is stripped away, the people who comprise the government (the legislators, administrators, judges, and policemen), are guided by human interests, desires, beliefs, notions, and prejudices, just like other people. They have neither superhuman wisdom nor extraordinary virtue.
The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.
When you don't fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else's eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you're still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become the mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can't remove his mask, the bionic man who's missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can't even remember what it was like.
Climbing is a heroic liberating act; and height spontaneously symbolizes things of high value, be it in the value of worldly power or of spirituality. To rise in an elevator, balloon, or airplane is to experience being liberated from weight, sublimated, invested with superhuman abilities. In addition, to rise from the earth is to approach the realm of light and overview. Therefore the negative overcoming of weight is at the same time the positive achievement of enlightenment and an unobstructed outlook.
Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat. When your desires are strong enough you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.
Probably the most pervasive false belief most of us harbor is the fallacy that only some superhuman act would have the power to turn our problems around. Nothing could be further from the truth. Life is cumulative. Whatever results we're experiencing in our lives are the accumulation of a host of small decisions we've made as individuals, as a family, as a community, as a society, and as a species.
The word enlightenment conjures up the idea of some superhuman accomplishment, and the ego likes to keep it that way, but it is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being.
Let me... remind you that it is only by working with an energy which is almost superhuman and which looks to uninterested spectators like insanity that we can accomplish anything worth the achievement. Work is the keystone of a perfect life. Work and trust in God.
Every politically controlled educational system will inculcate the doctrine of state supremacy sooner or later. . . . Once that doctrine has been accepted, it becomes an almost superhuman task to break the stranglehold of the political power over the life of the citizen. It has had his body, property and mind in its clutches from infancy. An octopus would sooner release its prey. A tax-supported, compulsory educational system is the complete model of the totalitarian state.
Yet, when these facts are seen side by side with other facts in the case, it is difficult not to become lost in superstitious awe. Their very absurdity seems to prohibit the use of the words 'chance' and 'coincidence.' For the sceptic there remains only one consolation: if there should be such a thing as superhuman Law, it is administered with sub-human inefficiency.
Modern transcendental idealism, Emersonianism, for instance, also seems to let God evaporate into abstract Ideality. Not a deity in concreto, not a superhuman person, but the immanent divinity in things, the essentially spiritual structure of the universe, is the object of the transcendentalist cult. In that address of the graduating class at Divinity College in 1838 which made Emerson famous, the frank expression of this worship of mere abstract laws was what made the scandal of the performance.
Remind yourself regularly that you are better than you think you are. Successful people are not superhuman. Success does not require a super-intellect. Nor is there anything mystical about success. And success isn't based on luck. Successful people are just ordinary folks who have developed belief in themselves and what they do. Never...yes, never...sell yourself short.