The potential of the average person is like a huge ocean unsailed, a new continent unexplored, a world of possibilities waiting to be released and channeled toward some great good.

I believe we all have one true love, somewhere in this world I do.

And yet,' she said gently, 'God hasn't come to a standstill.' Suddenly she laughed. 'I think you're like one of your own lumps of clay, Andy. God has a plan for you, and He's trying to get you into the centre of it, and you keep dodging and slithering away.' She turned her dark eyes on mine. 'How do you know? Maybe He wants to make you into something wonderful!

That's the excitement in obedience, finding out later what God had in mind.

I think you're like one of your own lumps of clay, Andy. God has a plan for you, and He's trying to get you into the center of it, and you keep dodging and slithering away.

And doubtless, my going on this whaling voyage, formed part of the grand programme of Providence that was drawn up a long time ago. It came in as a brief interlude and solo between more extensive performances. I take it that this part of the bill must have run something like this: Grand Contested Election for the Presidency of the United States Whaling Voyage by One Ishmael Bloody Battle in Affghanistan

More terrible, to see how feline Fate will sometimes dally with a human soul, and by a nameless magic make it repulse a sane despair with a hope which is but mad. Unwittingly I imp this cat-like thing, sporting with the heart of him who reads; for if he feel not he reads in vain.

The straight warp of necessity, not to be swerved from its ultimate course— its every alternating vibration, indeed, only tending to that; free will still free to ply her shuttle between given threads; and chance, though restrained in its play within the right lines of necessity, and sideways in its motions directed by free will, though thus prescribed to by both, chance by turns rules either, and has the last featuring blow at events.

Come what will, one comfort's always left — that unfailing comfort is, it's all predestinated.

This warp seemed necessity; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

Forehead to forehead I meet thee, this third time, Moby Dick!

A man going uphill may be at the same level as another man going down hill; but they are facing different ways and have different destinies. Our world, passing out of the old Paganism of Greece and Rome towards the consummation of Christendom and a Catholic civilization from which we all derive, is the very negation of the same world leaving the light of its ancestral religion and sliding back into the dark.