If really good people who are deeply committed and who are thriving spiritually have to beat down the nature with which they seem to have been born and cut themselves off from the full realization of love, how can that be pleasing to God?
The end of writing is to instruct; the end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing.
I want before God that everything, every thought, attitude, action, motive, desire in my heart be pleasing to Him. I ask Him, 'Keep the spotlight of your Spirit on me so there would be nothing impure or unholy in my life. ' That's been my prayer for 50 years.
I don't believe that raising my voice in song is going to be pleasing to a God who is sitting upstairs somewhere, waiting to be pleased.
Ah, happy hills! ah, pleasing shade! Ah, fields beloved in vain! Where once my careless childhood stray'd, A stranger yet to pain! I feel the gales that from ye blow A momentary bliss bestow.
It will be most pleasing to O[ur] L[ord] if you husband your strength in order to serve Him better.
You can spend your time on stage pleasing the heckler in the back, or you can devote it to the audience that came to hear you perform.
Obedience unites us so closely to God that it in a way transforms us into Him, so that we have no other will but His. If obedience is lacking, even prayer cannot be pleasing to God.
We cannot all hope to combine the pleasing qualities of good looks, brains, and eloquence.
Above all sing spiritually. Have an eye to God in every word you sing. Aim at pleasing him more than yourself, or any other creature. In order to do this attend strictly to the sense of what you sing, and see that your heart is not carried away with the sound, but offered to God continually; so shall your singing be such as the Lord will approve here, and reward you when he comes in the clouds of heaven.
Ah, how sweet it is to love! Ah, how gay is young Desire! And what pleasing pains we prove When we first approach Love's fire!
Yet is beauty the pleasing trickery that cheateth half the world.
There are three gems upon this earth; food, water, and pleasing words - fools (mudhas) consider pieces of rocks as gems.
There is not a Musselman[Muslim] alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side.
A graceful and pleasing figure is a perpetual letter of recommendation.
Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; seperation from what is pleasing is suffering. . . in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
To all, to each, a fair good-night, and pleasing dreams, and slumbers light.
There is no action of man in this life that is not the beginning of so long a chain of consequences as no human providence is high enough to give a man a prospect in the end. And in this chain, there are linked together both pleasing and unpleasing events in such manner as he that will do anything for his pleasure must engage himself to suffer all the pains annexed to it.
Sing me not a song; let me hear your recital of veneration and respect; this I will listen to over and over when I share your need of pleasing.
. . . those serpents! There's no pleasing them!