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God

principal object of faith in monotheistic religions, a divine entity that created and typically supervises all existence
For other uses, see God (disambiguation).

In monotheism, God is conceived of as the Supreme Being and principal object of faith.

Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb or deaf, or the seeing or the blind? have not I the LORD? ~ Exodus
The gods of all pagan faiths have been allied with the rich rulers. The priests of most religions are the employees of the landowners. But the God of Israel has always claimed to be with the poor—whether in the legislation of Deuteronomy, the words of the prophets, or the experiences of the New Testament. Our God is on the side of the poor. ~ John Howard Yoder
I know what you know not. ~ Quran
Oppressed and oppressors cannot possibly mean the same thing when they speak of God. The God of the oppressed is a God of revolution who breaks the chains of slavery. The oppressors' God is a God of slavery and must be destroyed along with the oppressors. ~ James Cone
God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of the things most dear and sacred to him. ~ Ludwig Feuerbach
God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. ~ Psalms 46:1 - 3
The only mark of God in us is that we feel that we are not God. ~ Simone Weil
When we consider what is our thought of God we find that it is our own soul stripped of all inferiority and carried out to perfection. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God. ~ Hermann Cohen
He best honors God who makes his intellect as like God as possible. ~ Quintus Sextius
We cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. ~ John Calvin
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him. ~ Voltaire
The love of gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul, when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the one who has it. ~ Gregory of Nyssa
If we find great difficulty from its admirable arrangement in conceiving that the Universe has existed from all eternity, and to resolve this difficulty suppose a Creator, how much more clearly must we perceive the necessity of this very Creator’s creation. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
Even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
If I said decisively, “I have seen God,” that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated. ~ Georges Bataille
How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer
All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him. ~ Martin Buber
The God who appears to me is the comforter of the poor and their avenger in world history. This avenger of the poor is the God I love. ~ Hermann Cohen
God is denied either because the world is so bad or because the world is so good. ~ Nikolai Berdyaev
To love another person
Is to see the face of God! ~ Herbert Kretzmer

Arranged alphabetically by author or source:
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A

Quotations listed alphabetically by author or work.
  • When we say God is a spirit, we know what we mean, as well as we do when we say that the pyramids of Egypt are matter. Let us be content, therefore, to believe him to be a spirit, that is, an essence that we know nothing of, in which originally and necessarily reside all energy, all power, all capacity, all activity, all wisdom, all goodness.
  • Nearer, my God, to Thee—
    Nearer to Thee—
    E'en though it be a cross
    That raiseth me;
    Still all my song shall be
    Nearer, my God, to Thee,
    Nearer to Thee!
    • Sarah Flower Adams, Nearer, my God, to Thee! (c. 1841); an article in Notes and Queries states that the words were written by her sister, Mrs. Byrdes Flower Adams, and the music only by Sarah Flower Adams.
  • Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.
    • And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.
    • Variant translation: We should not listen to those who like to affirm that the voice of the people is the voice of God, for the tumult of the masses is truly close to madness.
    • Alcuin Works, Epistle 127 (to Charlemagne, AD 800)
  • Never place a period where God has placed a comma.
    • Gracie Allen, in her last letter to George Burns, as quoted in Two Minutes for God : Quick Fixes for the Spirit (2007) by Peter B. Panagore, p. 73; this was later used in a slogan for the United Church of Christ: Never place a period where God has placed a comma. God Is Still Speaking.
  • Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.
  • If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a Swiss bank.
  • The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter... if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he is evil. I think that the worst thing you could say is that he is, basically, an under-achiever. If God exists, I hope he has a good excuse.
    • Woody Allen, Love and Death (1975); also quoted in What Do Jews Believe? : The Customs and Culture of Modern Judaism (2007) by Edward Kessler, p. 66
  • How can I believe in God when just last week I got my tongue caught in the roller of an electric typewriter?
    • Woody Allen, as quoted in Love, Sex, Death & The Meaning of Life : The Films of Woody Allen (2001) by Foster Hirsch, p. 50
  • Love even the knot-grass. God created it.
    • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book One: The Call, 237, (1924)
  • Shepherds have received the revelations, While emperors have searched for them. Dogmatic scholars have resisted them. Leaders have been fearful of them. The Voice of God overshadows all when there is spiritual readiness.
    • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book One: The Call, 367, (1924)
  • The canon, “By thy God,” is the higher, and this canon is the basis of the New World. Formerly one said: “And my spirit rejoiceth in God, my Savior.” Now you will say: “And my spirit rejoiceth in God, thy Savior.” Solemnly do I say that therein is salvation. “Long live thy God!” So you will say to everyone; and, exchanging Gods, you will walk to the One.
    There where one might otherwise sink one can tread softly, if without negation. There where one could suffocate one can pass, by pronouncing “Thy God.” There where matter is revered one can pass only by elevating the earthly matter into the Cosmos. Essentially, one should not have any attachment to Earth... Thus, find the God of each one and exalt Him.
    • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden II, Illumination, 211, (1924)
  • What is meant by "mad in God"? Why were the prophets of antiquity called madmen? Precisely because of the fire of straight-knowledge, which isolated them from all else, a valuable quality that severed them from the ordinary, everyday ways of thinking.
  • Even in the most ancient times people understood the significance of the heart. They regarded the heart as the Dwelling of God.
  • I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.
    • Susan B. Anthony, in an address to the National American Woman Suffrage Association (1896)
  • God is the most noble of beings. Now it is impossible for a body to be the most noble of beings; for a body must be either animate or inanimate; and an animate body is manifestly nobler than any inanimate body. But an animate body is not animate precisely as body; otherwise all bodies would be animate. Therefore its animation depends upon some other thing, as our body depends for its animation on the soul. Hence that by which a body becomes animated must be nobler than the body. Therefore it is impossible that God should be a body.
  • Ordina l'uomo, e dio dispone.
    • Man proposes, and God disposes.
    • Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516), Chapter XLVI. 35
  • If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul.
  • God, in order to speak to Abraham, must come from somewhere, must enter the earthly realm from some unknown heights or depths. Whence does he come, whence does he call to Abraham? We are not told. He does not come, like Zeus or Poseidon, from the Aethiopians, where he has been enjoying a sacrificial feast. Nor are we told anything of his reasons for tempting Abraham so terribly. He has not, like Zeus, discussed them in set speeches with other gods gathered in council; nor have the deliberations in his own heart been presented to us; unexpected and mysterious, he enters the scene from some unknown height or depth and calls: Abraham! It will at once be said that this is to be explained by the particular concept of God which the Jews held and which was wholly different from that of the Greeks. True enough—but this constitutes no objection. For how is the Jewish concept of God to be explained? Even their earlier God of the desert was not fixed in form and content, and was alone; his lack of form, his lack of local habitation, his singleness, was in the end not only maintained but developed even further in competition with the comparatively far more manifest gods of the surrounding Near Eastern world. The concept of God held by the Jews is less a cause than a symptom of their manner of comprehending and representing things.
    • Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Willard R. Trask, trans. (Princeton: 1953), chapter 1
  • Deus scitur melius nesciendo.
 
I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. ~ Susan B. Anthony
  • A God who cannot smile could not have created this humorous universe.
  • God, the supreme being, is neither circumscribed by space, nor touched by time; he cannot be found in a particular direction, and his essence cannot change. The secret conversation is thus entirely spiritual; it is a direct encounter between God and the soul, abstracted from all material constraints.
    • Avicenna, as quoted in 366 Readings From Islam (2000), edited by Robert Van der Weyer

B

  • At certain great moments down the ages, God drew nearer to His people and humanity at the same time made great, though oft unconscious efforts to draw near to God. From one angle, it might be regarded as God transcendent recognizing God immanent, and God in man reaching out to God in the Whole and greater than the Whole. On the part of God, working through the Head of the spiritual Hierarchy and its Membership, this effort was intentional, conscious and deliberate; on the part of man, it has been in the past largely unconscious, forced upon humanity by the tragedy of circumstances, by desperate need and by the driving urge of the immanent Christ consciousness.
    • Alice Bailey, Problems Of Humanity, Chapter V The Problem of the Churches - Part 2, (1944)
  • The Eastern faiths have ever emphasised God Immanent, deep within the human heart, "nearer than hands and feet", the Self, the One, the Atma, smaller than the small, yet all-comprehensive. The Western faiths have presented God Transcendent, Outside His universe, an Onlooker. God transcendent, first of all, conditioned men's concept of Deity, for the action of this transcendent God appeared in the process of nature; later, in the Jewish dispensation, God appeared as the tribal Jehovah, as the soul (the rather unpleasant soul) of a nation. Next, God was seen as a perfected man, and the divine God-man walked the Earth in the Person of the Christ.
  • Today we have a rapidly growing emphasis upon God immanent in every human being, and in every created form. Today, we should have the churches presenting a synthesis of these two ideas, which have been summed up for us in the statement of Shri Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita: "Having pervaded this whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain." God, greater than the created whole, yet God present also in the part; God Transcendent guarantees the Plan of our world, and is the Purpose conditioning all lives from the minutest atom, up through all the kingdoms of nature, to man.
    • Alice Bailey in The Reappearance of the Christ p. 145, (1947)
  • True religion is again emerging in the hearts of men in every land; this recognition of a divine hope and background may possibly take people back into the church and into the world faiths, but it will most certainly take them back to God.
    • Alice Bailey The Reappearance of the Christ, Chapter Three (1947)
  • Religion is the name, surely, which we give to the invocative appeal of humanity which leads to the evocative response of the Spirit of God. This Spirit works in every human heart and in all groups.
    • Alice Bailey The Reappearance of the Christ, Chapter Three (1947)
  • Slowly, there is dawning upon the awakening consciousness of humanity the great paralleling truth of God Immanent – divinely "pervading" all forms, conditioning from within all kingdoms in nature, expressing innate divinity through human beings. . . . There is a growing and developing belief that Christ is in us, as He was in the Master Jesus, and this belief will alter world affairs and mankind's entire attitude to life. (13 – 592).
    • Alice Bailey in The Externalization of the Hierarchy p. 592, (1957)
  • God Transcendent, greater, vaster and more inclusive than His created world, is universally recognised and has been generally emphasised; all faiths can say with Shri Krishna (speaking as God, the Creator) that "having pervaded the whole universe with a fragment of Myself, I remain." This God Transcendent has dominated the religious thinking of millions of simple and spiritually-minded people down the centuries which have elapsed since humanity began to press forward towards divinity.
    • Alice Bailey The Externalisation Of The Hierarchy The Return of the Christ - Part 1, (1957)
  • A jealous lover of human liberty, and deeming it the absolute condition of all that we admire and respect in humanity, I reverse the phrase of Voltaire, and say that if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him.
  • I conceive of God, in fact, as a means of liberation and not a means to control others.
    • James Baldwin "In Search of a Majority" address delivered at Kalamazoo College (February 1960); republished in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961)
  • If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
    • James Baldwin "Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)
  • The glory of God is not contingent on man's good will, but all existence subserves his purposes. The system of the universe is as a celestial poem, whose beauty is from all eternity, and must not be marred by human interpolations. Things proceed as they were ordered, in their nice, and well-adjusted, and perfect harmony; so that as the hand of the skilful artist gathers music from the harp-strings, history calls it forth from the well-tuned chords of time. Not that this harmony can be heard during the tumult of action. Philosophy comes after events, and gives the reason of them, and describes the nature of their results. The great mind of collective man may, one day, so improve in self-consciousness as to interpret the present and foretell the future; but as yet, the end of what is now happening, though we ourselves partake in it, seems to fall out by chance. All is nevertheless one whole; individuals, families, peoples, the race, march in accord with the Divine will; and when any part of the destiny of humanity is fulfilled, we see the ways of Providence vindicated. The antagonisms of imperfect matter and the perfect idea, of liberty and necessary law, become reconciled. What seemed irrational confusion, appears as the web woven by light, liberty and love. But this is not perceived till a great act in the drama of life is finished. The prayer of the patriarch, when he desired to behold the Divinity face to face, was denied; but he was able to catch a glimpse of Jehovah, after He had passed by; and so it fares with our search for Him in the wrestlings of the world. It is when the hour of conflict is over, that history comes to a right understanding of the strife, and is ready to exclaim: "Lo! God is here, and we knew it not."
  • When the mind is not dissipated upon extraneous things, nor diffused over the world about us through the senses, it withdraws within itself, and of its own accord ascends to the contemplation of God.
  • We thus become temples of God whenever earthly cares cease to interrupt the continuity of our memory of Him.
  • If I said decisively, “I have seen God,” that which I see would change. Instead of the inconceivable unknown—wildly free before me, leaving me wild and free before it—there would be a dead object and the thing of the theologian, to which the unknown would be subjugated.
  • If by Godot I had meant God I would have said God, and not Godot.
    • Samuel Beckett, on the title of one of his most famous plays, Waiting for Godot, as quoted in The Essential Samuel Beckett : An Illustrated Biography, by Enoch Brater (revised edition, 2003), p. 75
  • How many questions arise in this place! Constantly the question comes up: Where was God in those days? Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil? . . . We must continue to cry out humbly yet insistently to God: Rouse yourself! Do not forget mankind, your creature!
  • Mysticism is the realisation of God, of the Universal Self. It is attained either as a realisation of God outside the Mystic, or within himself. In the first case, it is usually reached from within a religion, by exceptionally intense love and devotion, accompanied by purity of life, for only "the pure in heart shall see God".
    • Annie Besant in Annie Besant Quotes ISBN-13: 978-1535078498 (2016)
  • It is patent to every student of the closing forty years of the last century, that crowds of thoughtful and moral people have slipped away from the churches, because the teachings they received there outraged their intelligence and shocked their moral sense. It is idle to pretend that the widespread agnosticism of this period had its root either in lack of morality or in deliberate crookedness of mind. Everyone who carefully studies the phenomena presented will admit that men of strong intellect have been driven out of Christianity by the crudity of the religious ideas set before them, the contradictions in the authoritative teachings, the views as to God, man, and the universe that no trained intelligence could possibly admit. Nor can it be said that any kind of moral degradation lay at the root of the revolt against the dogmas of the Church. The rebels were not too bad for their religion; on the contrary, it was the religion that was too bad for them. The rebellion against popular Christianity was due to the awakening and the growth of conscience; it was the conscience that revolted, as well as the intelligence, against teachings dishonouring to God and man alike, that represented God as a tyrant, and man as essentially evil, gaining salvation by slavish submission.
  • Another precept of Jesus which remains as "a hard saying" to his followers is: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect". [S. Matt., v, 48. ] The ordinary Christian knows that he cannot possibly obey this command; full of ordinary human frailties and weaknesses, how can he become perfect as God is perfect? Seeing the impossibility of the achievement set before him, he quietly puts it aside, and thinks no more about it. But seen as the crowning effort of many lives of steady improvement, as the triumph of the God within us over the lower nature, it comes within calculable distance, and we recall the words of Porphyry, how the man who achieves "the paradigmatic virtues is the Father of the Gods", and that in the Mysteries these virtues were acquired.
  • For so reverent is God to that Spirit which is Himself in man, that He will not even pour into the human soul a flood of strength and life unless that soul is willing to receive it. There must be an opening from below as well as an outpouring from above, the receptiveness of the lower nature as well as the willingness of the higher to give. That is the link between the Christ and the man; that is what the churches have called the outpouring of "divine grace"; that is what is meant by the "faith" necessary to make the grace effective. As Giordano Bruno once put it — the human soul has windows, and can shut those windows close. The sun outside is shining, the light is unchanging; let the windows be opened and the sunlight must stream in. The light of God is beating against the windows of every human soul, and when the windows are thrown open, the soul becomes illuminated. There is no change in God, but there is a change in man; and man's will may not be forced, else were the divine Life in him blocked in its due evolution. Thus in every Christ that rises, all humanity is lifted a step higher, and by His wisdom the ignorance of the whole world is lessened.
  • Zeus, n. The chief of Grecian gods, adored by the Romans as Jupiter and by the modern Americans as God, Gold, Mob and Dog. Some explorers who have touched upon the shores of America, and one who professes to have penetrated a considerable distance to the interior, have thought that these four names stand for as many distinct deities, but in his monumental work on Surviving Faiths, Frumpp insists that the natives are monotheists, each having no other god than himself, whom he worships under many sacred names.
  • Although neither an alchemist, magician, nor astrologer, but simply a great philosopher, Henry More, of Cambridge University — a man universally esteemed, may be named as a shrewd logician, scientist, and metaphysician... His faith in immortality and able arguments in demonstration of the survival of man's spirit after death are all based on the Pythagorean system... and other mystics. The infinite and uncreated spirit that we usually call God, a substance of the highest virtue and excellency, produced everything else by emanative causality. God thus is the primary substance... He...stoutly defended the theory of the individuality of every soul in which "personality, memory, and conscience will surely continue in the future state." He divided the astral spirit of man after its exit from the body into two distinct entities: the "aerial" and the "aethereal vehicle." During the time that a disembodied man moves in its aerial clothing, he is subject to Fate -- i.e., evil and temptation, attached to its earthly interests, and therefore is not utterly pure; it is only when he casts off this garb of the first spheres and becomes ethereal that he becomes sure of his immortality. "For what shadow can that body cast that is a pure and transparent light, such as the ethereal vehicle is? And therefore that oracle is then fulfilled, when the soul has ascended into that condition we have already described, in which alone it is out of the reach of fate and mortality."
    • H.P. Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, Before the Veil, (1877)
  • It is not the One unknown ever-present God in Nature, or Nature in abscondito, that is rejected, but the “God” of human dogma, and his humanized “Word.” Man, in his infinite conceit and inherent pride and vanity, shaped it himself with his sacrilegious hand out of the material he found in his own small brain-fabric, and forced it upon his fellows as a direct revelation from the one unrevealed Space.
  • Esoteric Philosophy...denies Deity no more than it does the sun. Esoteric Philosophy has never rejected God in Nature, nor Deity as the absolute and abstract Ens. It only refuses to accept any of the gods of the so-called monotheistic religions, gods created by man in his own image and likeness, a blasphemous and sorry caricature of the Ever-Unknowable.
    • H.P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine, Vol. 1 (1888)
  • We reject the idea of a personal, or an extra-cosmic and anthropomorphic God, who is but the gigantic shadow of man, and not of man at his best, either. The God of theology, we say—and prove it—is a bundle of contradictions and a logical impossibility... Our DEITY is neither in a paradise, nor in a particular tree, building, or mountain; it is everywhere, in every atom of the visible as of the invisible Cosmos, in, over, and around every invisible atom and divisible molecule; for IT is the mysterious power of evolution and involution, the omnipresent, omnipotent, and even omniscient creative potentiality.
  • If we have to believe in a divine principle at all, it must be in one which is as absolute harmony, logic, and justice, as it is absolute love, wisdom, and impartiality; and a God who would create every soul for the space of one brief span of life, regardless of the fact whether it has to animate the body of a wealthy, happy man, or that of a poor suffering wretch, hapless from birth to death though he has done nothing to deserve his cruel fate—would be rather a senseless fiend than a God.
  • How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.
  • To everyone God is the kind of God he believes in.
  • Only what is fated to die is capable of living. Only what dies lives. Why do you think Christ was killed? They killed him to prove that he wasn’t a god. But in killing him, they immortalized the perishable and transformed man into a god.
  • Goddes love
    is unescapable as nature's environment,
    which if a man ignore or think to thrust it off
    he is the ill-natured fool that runneth on to death.
  • That we devote ourselves to God is seen
    In living just as though no God there were.
  • God is the perfect poet,
    Who in his person acts his own creations.
  • All service is the same with God,
    With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
    Are we: there is no last nor first.
  • All names of God remain hallowed because they have been used not only to speak of God but also to speak to him.
  • Some would deny any legitimate use of the word God because it has been misused so much. Certainly it is the most burdened of all human words. Precisely for that reason it is the most imperishable and unavoidable. And how much weight has all erroneous talk about God's nature and works (although there never has been nor can be any such talk that is not erroneous) compared with the one truth that all men who have addressed God really meant him? For whoever pronounces the word God and really means Thou, addresses, no matter what his delusion, the true Thou of his life that cannot be restricted by any other and to whom he stands in a relationship that includes all others.
  • When we rise out of [the night] into the new life and there begin to receive the signs, what can we know of that which—of him who gives them to us? Only what we experience from time to time from the signs themselves. If we name the speaker of this speech God, then it is always the God of a moment, a moment God.
  • According to mythological thinking, God has his domicile in heaven. What is the meaning of this statement? The meaning is quite clear. In a crude manner it expresses the idea that God is beyond the world, that He is transcendent. The thinking which is not yet capable of forming the abstract idea of transcendence expresses its intention in the category of space.
    • Rudolf Bultmann, “Jesus Christ and Mythology,” Interpreting Faith for the Modern Era, p. 294
  • “Don’t you know everything?”
    God smiled. “No, I outgrew that trick long ago. You can’t imagine how boring it was.”
  • God's merits are so transcendent that it is not surprising his faults should be in reasonable proportion.
  • There is no god but God! — to prayer — lo!
    God is great!

C

  • Our feeling of ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption, reminds us ... that in the Lord, and none but He, dwell the true light of wisdom, solid virtue, exuberant goodness. We are accordingly urged by our own evil things to consider the good things of God; and, indeed, we cannot aspire to Him in earnest until we have begun to be displeased with ourselves. For what man is not disposed to rest in himself? Who, in fact, does not thus rest, so long as he is unknown to himself; that is, so long as he is contented with his own endowments, and unconscious or unmindful of his misery? Every person, therefore, on coming to the knowledge of himself, is not only urged to seek God, but is also led as by the hand to find him.
  • Except during my childhood, when I was probably influenced by Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel depiction of God with a flowing white beard, I have never tried to project the Creator in any kind of human likeness. The vociferous debates about whether God is male or female seem ridiculous to me. I think of God as an omnipotent and omniscient presence, a spirit that permeates the universe, the essence of truth, nature, being, and life. To me, these are profound and indescribable concepts that seem to be trivialized when expressed in words.
  • Although every believing Christian understands that God guides our steps, fewer and fewer emphasize the point. A God working actively in the world makes us uneasy. We tend to like our God distant and a bit malleable, ready to bend to every new human idea. A God with a will of his own is too scary, and, besides, he might get in the way of our satisfaction of immediate desire.
  • Promises made to others in God's name engage the divine honor, fidelity, truthfulness, and authority. They must be respected in justice. To be unfaithful to them is to misuse God's name and in some way to make God out to be a liar. (1 John 1:10)
  • True religion consists in proposing, as our great end, a growing likeness to the Supreme Being. Its noblest influence consists in making us more and more partakers of the Divinity.
  • Religious instruction should aim chiefly to turn men’s aspirations and efforts to that perfection of the soul, which constitutes it a bright image of God.
  • If [people] wish to love God, they [must] be prepared to do so no matter what His intentions. God is not just, God is not kind, God is not merciful, and understanding that is essential to true devotion.
  • God can only set in motion:
    He cannot control the things he has made.
    • T'ao Ch'ien, Substance, Shadow, and Spirit, "Spirit expounds" (transl. by Arthur Waley)
  • First of all you – you fucking fake Christians – don’t fucking question my Christianity. I grew up in the church. My grandfather was a minister, who is with God now and talks to me in my dreams from God’s corner office. I am a former Sunday school teacher. I taught the Bible to children and showed them how to love God and invite him into their hearts. I believe in God – but I don’t fear him. God is my best friend. God is my ally. God is my boyfriend. God is my best fag. I am God’s fag hag cuz didn’t you know, God is a big fag. Serious bottom too. Butch in the streets, femme in the sheets. That is my God. God is my biggest fan. God gets me, dude.
God wants us all to just get along. He doesn’t give a shit about the profanity. The bitch fucking invented profanity. He thinks it is hilarious. He just wants you to talk to him, and he doesn’t care what you have to say. He just wants to keep the conversation going. Like Jay-Z, he just wants to love you. He just wants you to be able to make your own decisions. God is all about you and what you need. God is happy that you are gay. God made you fucking gay cuz he thinks it is awesome. God understands if you need to have an abortion. That is why he created abortion, on the 8th day. God accepts. God forgives. God loves all of us, even though some of us might have a problem with each other.
  • Dii immortales ad usum hominum fabricati pene videantur.
  • Cicero, De legibus, book 3
  • God: a disease we imagine we are cured of because no one dies of it nowadays.
  • In most cases we attach ourselves to God in order to take revenge on life, to punish it, to signify we can do without it, that we have found something better.
  • The rash assertion that ‘God made man in His own image’ is ticking like a time bomb at the foundations of many faiths, and as the hierarchy of the universe is disclosed to us, we may have to recognize this chilling truth: if there are any gods whose chief concern is man, they cannot be very important gods.
  • I don't believe in God but I'm very interested in her.
    • Arthur C. Clarke, as quoted in Multiple Intelligences in Practice : Enhancing Self-esteem and Learning in the Classroom (2006) by Mike Fleetham, Section 2 : Using MI
  • Haven’t you ever watched ants struggling with a load too big for them? How much did you care? Even if, like God, you marked the fall of every sparrow, you might simply be conducting a survey or expressing colossal boredom, like the people who delight in measuring things.
  • The God who appears to me is the comforter of the poor and their avenger in world history. This avenger of the poor is the God I love.
    • Hermann Cohen, The Concept of Religion in the System of Philosophy (1915), p. 81
  • Only the idea of God gives me the confidence that morality will become reality on earth. And because I cannot live without this confidence, I cannot live without God.
    • Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen (1971), p. 5
  • Reason alone cannot prove the existence of God. Faith is reason plus revelation, and the revelation part requires one to think with the spirit as well as with the mind. You have to hear the music, not just read the notes on the page.
  • God is dead not because He doesn't exist, but because we live, play, procreate, govern, and die as though He doesn't.
  • Oppressed and oppressors cannot possibly mean the same thing when they speak of God. The God of the oppressed is a God of revolution who breaks the chains of slavery. The oppressors' God is a God of slavery and must be destroyed along with the oppressors.
    • James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation (1970), p. 61
  • God never meant that man should scale the Heavens
    By strides of human wisdom. In his works,
    Though wondrous, he commands us in his word
    To seek him rather where his mercy shines.
  • But who with filial confidence inspired,
    Can lift to Heaven an unpresumptuous eye,
    And smiling say, My Father made them all.
    • William Cowper, The Task (1785), Book V. The Winter Morning Walk, line 745
  • Acquaint thyself with God, if thou would'st taste
    His works.     Admitted once to his embrace,
    Thou shalt perceive that thou wast blind before:
    Thine eye shall be instructed; and thine heart
    Made pure shall relish with divine delight
    Till then unfelt, what hands divine have wrought.

D

 
We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. ~ Freeman Dyson
  • I don't believe in God because I don't believe in Mother Goose.
    • Speech in Toronto (1930); as quoted in "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996) by James A. Haught.
    • Variant: I believe that religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don’t believe in either. I don’t believe in God as I don’t believe in Mother Goose.
      • As quoted in Jesus: Myth Or Reality? (2006) by Ian Curtis
    • Religion is the belief in future life and in God. I don't believe in either.
  • I am an Agnostic because I am not afraid to think. I am not afraid of any god in the universe who would send me or any other man or woman to hell. If there were such a being, he would not be a god; he would be a devil.
    • Clarence Darrow as quoted in a eulogy for Darrow by Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1938)
  • I am an agnostic as to the question of God. I think that it is impossible for the human mind to believe in an object or thing unless it can form a mental picture of such object or thing. Since man ceased to worship openly an anthropomorphic God and talked vaguely and not intelligently about some force in the universe, higher than man, that is responsible for the existence of man and the universe, he cannot be said to believe in God. One cannot believe in a force excepting as a force that pervades matter and is not an individual entity. To believe in a thing, an image of the thing must be stamped on the mind. If one is asked if he believes in such an animal as a camel, there immediately arises in his mind an image of the camel. This image has come from experience or knowledge of the animal gathered in some way or other. No such image comes, or can come, with the idea of a God who is described as a force.
  • To say that God made the universe gives us no explanation of the beginnings of things. If we are told that God made the universe, the question immediately arises: Who made God? Did he always exist, or was there some power back of that? Did he create matter out of nothing, or is his existence coextensive with matter? The problem is still there. What is the origin of it all? If, on the other hand, one says that the universe was not made by God, that it always existed, he has the same difficulty to confront. To say that the universe was here last year, or millions of years ago, does not explain its origin. This is still a mystery. As to the question of the origin of things, man can only wonder and doubt and guess.
  • Many Christians base the belief of a soul and God upon the Bible. Strictly speaking, there is no such book. To make the Bible, sixty-six books are bound into one volume. These books are written by many people at different times, and no one knows the time or the identity of any author. Some of the books were written by several authors at various times. These books contain all sorts of contradictory concepts of life and morals and the origin of things. Between the first and the last nearly a thousand years intervened, a longer time than has passed since the discovery of America by Columbus.
  • That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as a God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time? This very old argument from the existence of suffering against the existence of an intelligent first cause seems to me a strong one; whereas, as just remarked, the presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.
  • At the present day the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction and feelings which are experienced by most persons. But it cannot be doubted that Hindoos, Mahomadans and others might argue in the same manner and with equal force in favour of the existence of one God, or of many Gods, or as with the Buddists of no God. There are also many barbarian tribes who cannot be said with any truth to believe in what we call God: they believe indeed in spirits or ghosts, and it can be explained, as Tyler and Herbert Spencer have shown, how such a belief would be likely to arise….This argument would be a valid one if all men of all races had the same inward conviction of the existence of one God; but we know that this is very far from being the case. Therefore I cannot see that such inward convictions and feelings are of any weight as evidence of what really exists.
  • If you see yourself as God and then you come back from this state and somebody says, “Hey, Sam, empty the garbage!” it catches you back into the model of “I'm Sam who empties the garbage.” You can't maintain these new kinds of structures. It takes a while to realize that God can empty garbage.
  • A man who recognizes no God is probably placing an inordinate value on himself.
  • The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.
  • The trouble is that God in this sophisticated, physicist's sense bears no resemblance to the God of the Bible or any other religion. If a physicist says God is another name for Planck's constant, or God is a superstring, we should take it as a picturesque metaphorical way of saying that the nature of superstrings or the value of Planck's constant is a profound mystery. It has obviously not the smallest connection with a being capable of forgiving sins, a being who might listen to prayers, who cares about whether or not the Sabbath begins at 5pm or 6pm, whether you wear a veil or have a bit of arm showing; and no connection whatever with a being capable of imposing a death penalty on His son to expiate the sins of the world before and after he was born.
    • Richard Dawkins, from a lecture, extracted from The Nullifidian (December 1994)
 
It is solemn to remember that Vastness —
Is but the Shadow of the Brain which casts it — ~ Emily Dickinson
  • If man is created by an external source, then he must belong to that source and not to himself. According to Buddhism, man is responsible for everything he does. Thus Buddhists have no reason to believe that man came into existence in the human form through any external sources. They believe that man is here today because of his own action. He is neither punished nor rewarded by anyone but himself according to his own good and bad action. In the process of evolution, the human being came into existence. However, there are no Buddha-words to support the belief that the world was created by anybody. The scientific discovery of gradual development of the world-system conforms with the Buddha's Teachings.
  • They say that God is everywhere, and yet we always think of Him as somewhat of a recluse.
  • It is solemn to remember that Vastness —
    Is but the Shadow of the Brain which casts it —
    All things swept sole away
    This — is immensity —
  • If there is a supreme being, he's crazy.
  • God used beautiful mathematics in creating the world.
    • Paul Dirac, as quoted in The Cosmic Code : Quantum Physics As The Language Of Nature (1982) by Heinz R. Pagels, p. 295; also in Paul Adrien Maurice Dirac : Reminiscences about a Great Physicist (1990) edited by Behram N. Kursunoglu and Eugene Paul Wigner, p. xv
  • One could perhaps describe the situation by saying that God is a mathematician of a very high order, and He used very advanced mathematics in constructing the universe.
  • To be simple we must desire to remain in the image of God. We must not be so complex that we make God into our image!
    • Catherine Doherty, Unfinished Pilgrimage (Combermere, Ontario: Madonna House Publications, 1995), p. 12.
  • And you never ask questions/When God’s on your side /If God’s on our side/They’ll stop the next war
  • Charles Hartshorne... informed me that my theological standpoint is Socinian. ...The main tenet of the Socinian heresy is that God is neither omniscient nor omnipotent. He learns and grows as the universe unfolds. ...I ...find it congenial, and consistent with scientific common sense. I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. ...We are the chief inlets of God on this planet at the present stage... We may later grow with him as he grows, or we may be left behind. ...If we are left behind, it is an end. If we keep on growing, it is a beginning.
  • I do not make any clear distinction between mind and God. God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the scale of our comprehension. God may be either a world-soul or a collection of world-souls. So I am thinking that atoms and humans and God may have minds that differ in degree but not in kind. We stand, in a manner of speaking, midway between the unpredictability of atoms and the unpredictability of God. Atoms are small pieces of our mental apparatus, and we are small pieces of God's mental apparatus. Our minds may receive inputs equally from atoms and from God. This view of our place in the cosmos may not be true, but it is compatible with the active nature of atoms as revealed in the experiments of modern physics. I don't say that this personal theology is supported or proved by scientific evidence. I only say that it is consistent with scientific evidence.
  • I do not claim any ability to read God's mind. I am sure of only one thing. When we look at the glory of stars and galaxies in the sky and the glory of forests and flowers in the living world around us, it is evident that God loves diversity. Perhaps the universe is constructed according to a principle of maximum diversity.
    • Freeman Dyson, in "Progress In Religion : A Talk By Freeman Dyson" (9 May 2000)

E

 
Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not. ~ Albert Einstein
 
The God Spinoza revered is my God, too: I meet Him everyday in the harmonious laws which govern the universe. ~ Albert Einstein
 
God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
 
The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.
  • Where the human being in obedience goes out from his “I” and dismisses what is his own, God must necessarily enter in precisely there; for when someone does not will anything for himself, God must will for that person in the same way as He wills for himself.
  • When man humbles himself, God cannot restrain His mercy; He must come down and pour His grace into the humble man, and He gives Himself most of all, and all at once, to the least of all. It is essential to God to give, for His essence is His goodness and His goodness is His love. Love is the root of all joy and sorrow. Slavish fear of God is to be put away. The right fear is the fear of losing God. If the earth flee downward from heaven, it finds heaven beneath it; if it flee upward, it comes again to heaven. The earth cannot flee from heaven: whether it flee up or down, the heaven rains its influence upon it, and stamps its impress upon it, and makes it fruitful, whether it be willing or not. Thus doth God with men: whoever thinketh to escape Him, flies into His bosom, for every corner is open to Him. God brings forth His Son in thee, whether thou likest it or not, whether thou sleepest or wakest; God worketh His own will. That man is unaware of it, is man's fault, for his taste is so spoilt by feeding on earthly things that he cannot relish God's love. If we had love to God, we should relish God, and all His works; we should receive all things from God, and work the same works as He worketh.
  • If God is as real as the shadow of the Great War on Armistice Day, need we seek further reason for making a place for God in our thoughts and lives? We shall not be concerned if the scientific explorer reports that he is perfectly satisfied that he has got to the bottom of things without having come across either.
  • If we pray to God as a corporeal person, this will prevent us from relinquishing the human doubts and fears which attend such a belief, and so we cannot grasp the wonders wrought by infinite, incorporeal Love, to whom all things are possible.
  • Nature is what we know. We do not know the gods of religions. And nature is not kind, or merciful, or loving. If God made me — the fabled God of the three qualities of which I spoke: mercy, kindness, love — He also made the fish I catch and eat. And where do His mercy, kindness, and love for that fish come in? No; nature made us — nature did it all — not the gods of the religions
    • Thomas Edison, ""No Immortality of the Soul" says Thomas A. Edison. In Fact, He Doesn't Believe There Is a Soul — Human Beings Only an Aggregate of Cells and the Brain Only a Wonderful Machine, Says Wizard of Electricity". New York Times. October 2, 1910
  • I do not believe in the God of the theologians; but that there is a Supreme Intelligence I do not doubt.
    • Thomas Edison, The Freethinker (1970), G.W. Foote & Company, Volume 90, p. 147
  • I see only with deep regret that God punishes so many of His children for their numerous stupidities, for which only He Himself can be held responsible; in my opinion, only His nonexistence could excuse Him.
  • Raffiniert ist der Herrgott, aber boshaft ist er nicht.
    • Subtle is the Lord, but malicious He is not.
    • Remark made during Einstein's first visit to Princeton University (April 1921) as quoted in Einstein (1973) by R. W. Clark, Ch. 14. "God is slick, but he ain't mean" is a variant translation of this (1946) Unsourced variant: "God is subtle but he is not malicious."
    • When asked what he meant by this he replied. "Nature hides her secret because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse." (Die Natur verbirgt ihr Geheimnis durch die Erhabenheit ihres Wesens, aber nicht durch List.) As quoted in Subtle is the Lord — The Science and the Life of Albert Einstein (1982) by Abraham Pais einsteinandreligion.com
      • Originally said to Princeton University mathematics professor Oscar Veblen, May 1921, while Einstein was in Princeton for a series of lectures, upon hearing that an experimental result by Dayton C. Miller of Cleveland, if true, would contradict his theory of gravitation. But the claimed discrepancy was quite small and required special circumstances (hence Einsteins's remark). The result turned out to be false. Some say by this remark Einstein meant that Nature hides her secrets by being subtle, while others say he meant that nature is mischievous but not bent on trickery. [The Yale Book of Quotations, ed. Fred R. Shapiro, 2006]
    • Variant translation: God may be sophisticated, but he's not malicious.
      • As quoted in Cherished Illusions (2005) by Sarah Stern, p. 109
    • I have second thoughts. Maybe God is malicious.
    • Said to Valentine Bargmann, as quoted in Einstein in America (1985) by Jamie Sayen, p. 51, indicating that God leads people to believe they understand things that they actually are far from understanding; also in The Yale Book of Quotations (2006), ed. Fred R. Shapiro
  • The God Spinoza revered is my God, too: I meet Him everyday in the harmonious laws which govern the universe. My religion is cosmic, and my God is too universal to concern himself with the intentions of every human being. I do not accept a religion of fear; My God will not hold me responsible for the actions that necessity imposes. My God speaks to me through laws.
    • Albert Einstein, in an interview (1948), quoted in Einstein and the Poet : In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983) by William Hermanns, p. 59
  • About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church. As long as I can remember, I have resented mass indoctrination. I do not believe in the fear of life, in the fear of death, in blind faith. I cannot prove to you that there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. My God created laws that take care of that. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws.
    • Albert Einstein, in an interview (1948), quoted in Einstein and the Poet : In Search of the Cosmic Man (1983) by William Hermanns, p. 132
  • My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment.
  • What I see in nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of ‘humility.’ This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism. . . . My religiosity consists in a humble admiration of the infinitely superior spirit that reveals itself in the little that we, with our weak and transitory understanding, can comprehend of reality. . . . I want to know how God created this world. I want to know his thoughts, the rest are details.
  • These proposals spring, without ulterior purpose or political passion, from our calm conviction that the hunger for peace is in the hearts of all peoples--those of Russia and of China no less than of our own country. They conform to our firm faith that God created men to enjoy, not destroy, the fruits of the earth and of their own toil.
  • Posing the question: does the god of love use underarm deodorant, vaginal spray and fluoride toothpaste?
  • It is not by accident that the enormous popularity of the “death of God” was born in our world of images: the impossibility of representing God visually leads inevitably in our day to the impossibility of his existence. God is dead—but beyond all the explicit reasons generally offered, he is dead because he is not visible. We can have confidence only in a visible God who is clearly manifested, exclusively in the visual dimension.
    • Jacques Ellul, The Humiliation of the Word (1981), J. Hanks, trans. (1985), p. 198
  • Throughout the Old Testament we see God choosing what is weak and humble to represent him (the stammering Moses, the infant Samuel, Saul from an insignificant family, David confronting Goliath, etc.). Paul tells us that God chooses the weak things of the world to confound the mighty. Here, however, we have a striking contradiction. In Constantine God is supposedly choosing an Augustus, a triumphant military leader. This vision and this miracle are totally impossible. But they are not impossible in the context of Christianity that is already off the rails, that thinks of God as the one who directs history and is the motive power in politics.
    • Jacques Ellul, The Subversion of Christianity (1982), G. Bromiley, trans. (1986), p. 123
  • When we consider what is our thought of God we find that it is our own soul stripped of all inferiority and carried out to perfection.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sermon 86 (1830), The Complete Sermons of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume 2 (1990), p. 243
  • By going much alone a man will get more of a noble courage in thought and word than from all the wisdom that is in books. He will come to hear God speak as audibly through his own lips as ever He did by the mouth of Moses or Isaiah or Milton.
  • The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself. He is not to live the future as described to him but to live the real future to the real present. The highest revelation is that God is in every man.
  • Man thinking must not be subdued by his instruments. Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
    • Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” Addresses and Lectures, Complete Works (1883), vol. 1, p. 92
  • In calling his two sons by the names of Gershom and Eliezer, Moses, like Joseph and other righteous men, intended to have the fact of God's help constantly before him. Since his sons would be with him, and he would often address them or call them by name, he would remember his gratitude to God.
  • There is no place without God's presence. Even in the bush He was present, and this was the lesson of God's omnipresence that Moses learnt when he was called out of the bush.
  • Moses wanted to know God's name, and God tells him, 'I am that I am'; that is to say, 'I am called--or to be called-in accordance with my work in this world.' When I judge mankind I am אלהים Elohim, that being the title or designation for judgment. When I war with the wicked I am known as צבאות Zevooth. When I execute judgment for the sins of man I am known as אלשדי El Shadai, and when I am visiting the world with mercy I am אבני or יהוה Adonoi, the Eternal.
  • The matron whom we find so often arguing with Rabbi José observed one day to that sage, 'My god is surely greater than yours. When your God appeared to Moses in the bush, Moses merely covered his face, whilst when my god (the serpent) made its appearance he could not stand his ground at all, but had to run away out of fear.' 'Not so, 'returned the Rabbi, 'for in order to be out of the power of your god it sufficed for Moses to step a few paces back, but whither could he have fled from the presence of Him who filleth the earth?'
  • I am the first and I am the last, and beside Me there is no God' (Isa. 43. 6) I am the first, I have no father; I am the last, I have no brother. Beside Me there is no God; I have no son.
  • When God first called Moses, not being then an expert prophet, he was addressed in a voice similar to that of his own father, and he thought that his father had come to him from Egypt. God then told him that it was not his earthly father who called him, but the God of his father. Then, we find, Moses hid his face, which he did not do when first called by his name; not in fact until he heard the words, 'I am the God of thy fathers.'

F

  • The Church in the colonies is the white people’s Church. ... She does not call the native to God’s ways but to the ways of the white man, of the master, of the oppressor.
  • “Perhaps God—if there is one—doesn’t care,” Burton said. “There is no evidence whatsoever that He does.”
  • God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his highest feelings and thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of the things most dear and sacred to him.
  • By positing God as unknowable, man excuses himself to what is still left of his religious conscience for his oblivion of God, his surrender to the world. He negates God in practice – his mind and his senses have been absorbed by the world – but he does not negate him in theory. He does not attack his existence; he leaves it intact. But this existence neither affects nor incommodes him, for it is only a negative existence, an existence without existence; it is an existence that contradicts itself – a being that, in view of its effects, is indistinguishable from non-being.
    • Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1843), Z. Hanfi, trans., in The Fiery Brook (1972), p. 112
  • When the claims of God are revealed to the mind, it must necessarily yield to them, or strengthen itself in sin. It must, as it were, gird itself up, and struggle to resist the claims of duty. This strengthening self in sin under light is the particular form of sin which we call impenitence.
  • I believe in God, not in a Catholic God, there is no Catholic God, there is God and I believe in Jesus Christ, his incarnation. Jesus is my teacher and my pastor, but God, the Father, Abba, is the light and the Creator. This is my Being.
    • Pope Francis, interviewed in "How the Church will change" by Eugenio Scalfari in La Repubblica (1 October 2013), as translated from Italian to English by Kathryn Wallace
  • I have lived, Sir, a long time, and the longer I live, the more convincing proofs I see of this truth—that God governs in the affairs of men. And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without his notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without his aid?
    • Benjamin Franklin, debates in the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (June 28, 1787); reported in James Madison, Journal of the Federal Convention, ed. E. H. Scott (1893), p. 259–60. Franklin suggests that the Convention begin its sessions with prayers "imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations".

G

 
It is beyond my power to induce in you a belief in God. There are certain things which are self proved and certain which are not proved at all. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
 
I cannot think we are useless or Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each. ~ Geronimo
  • I looked and looked but I didn't see God.
    • Attributed to Yuri Gagarin after becoming the first person to orbit the Earth, as quoted in To Rise from Earth (1996) by Wayne Lee; the authenticity of this remark is disputed; Colonel Valentin Petrov stated in 2006 that the cosmonaut never said such words, and that the quote originated from Nikita Khrushchev's speech at the plenum of the Central Committee of the CPSU about the state's anti-religion campaign, saying "Gagarin flew into space, but didn't see any god there."
    • Sometimes misquoted as "I see no God up here" as if he said this in space, but there are no transcripts or recordings indicating that he ever did.
  • I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them.
    • Galileo Galilei. in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina (1615), an essay published in 1615, in response to enquiries of Christina of Tuscany, as quoted in Aspects of Western Civilization : Problems and Sources in History (1988) by Perry McAdow Rogers, p. 53
    • Variant translation: I do not think it is necessary to believe that the same God who has given us our senses, reason, and intelligence wished us to abandon their use, giving us by some other means the information that we could gain through them.
  • Mathematics is the language in which God wrote the universe.
    • Attributed to Galileo Galilei in Statistics: Concepts and Applications (1994) by Harry Frank and Steven C. Althoen, p. xxi
  • It is beyond my power to induce in you a belief in God. There are certain things which are self proved and certain which are not proved at all. The existence of God is like a geometrical axiom. It may be beyond our heart grasp. I shall not talk of an intellectual grasp. Intellectual attempts are more or less failures, as a rational explanation cannot give you the faith in a living God. For it is a thing beyond the grasp of reason. It transcends reason. There are numerous phenomena from which you can reason out the existence of God, but I shall not insult your intelligence by offering you a rational explanation of that type. I would have you brush aside all rational explanations and begin with a simple childlike faith in God. If I exist, God exists. With me it is a necessity of my being as it is with millions. They may not be able to talk about it, but from their life you can see that it is a part of their life. I am only asking you to restore the belief that has been undermined. In order to do so, you have to unlearn a lot of literature that dazzles your intelligence and throws you off your feet. Start with the faith which is also a token of humility and an admission that we know nothing, that we are less than atoms in this universe. We are less than atoms, I say, because the atom obeys the law of its being, whereas we in the insolence of our ignorance deny the law of nature. But I have no argument to address to those who have no faith.
  • People are even more reluctant to admit that man explains nothing, than they were to admit that God explains nothing.
  • Nimrod suggested to Abraham that since he had refused to worship his father's idols because of their want of power, he should worship fire, which is very powerful: Abraham pointed out that water has power over fire. 'But,' replied Abraham,' the clouds absorb the water and even they are dispersed by the wind.' 'Then let us declare the wind our god.' 'Bear in mind,' continued Abraham, 'that man is stronger than wind, and can resist it and stand against it.'
    Nimrod, becoming weary of arguing with Abraham, decided to cast him before his god--fire--and challenged Abraham's deliverance by the God of Abraham, but God saved him out of the fiery furnace.
  • I cannot think we are useless or Usen would not have created us. He created all tribes of men and certainly had a righteous purpose in creating each.
    • Geronimo, as quoted in Geronimo's Story of His Life (1907) as told to S.M. Barrett in 1905 and 1906, "Usen" is the Apache word for God.
  • If we desire to hold on to solidarity with everyone else in the communicative fellowship, even the dead ... then we must claim a reality that can reach beyond the here and now, or that can connect our selves beyond our own death with those who innocently went to their destruction before us. And it is this reality that the Christian tradition calls God.
    • Jens Glebe-Möller, A Political Dogmatic (1987), p. 102
  • We all of us try to make God in our image. It is one of the worst of our temptations.
  • Either half my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs.
    • Stephen Jay Gould, in "Impeaching a Self-Appointed Judge" in Scientific American (July 1992)
  • The love of gain, which is a large, incalculably large, element in every soul, when once applied to the desire for God, will bless the man who has it.
  • In vain do they think themselves innocent who appropriate to their own use alone those goods which God gave in common; by not giving to others that which they themselves receive, they become homicides and murderers, inasmuch as in keeping for themselves those things which would alleviate the sufferings of the poor, we may say that every day they cause the death of as many persons as they might have fed and did not. When, therefore, we offer the means of living to the indigent, we do not give them anything of ours, but that which of right belongs to them. It is less a work of mercy which we perform than the payment of a debt.
  • As one reads the scriptures of Christianity and Islam with a morally alert mind, one starts getting sick of the very sound of word ‘god’ which word is littered all over this literature like dead leaves in autumn. The deeds which are ascribed to or approved of by this God are quite often so cruel and obnoxious as to leave one wondering that if these are the doings of the Divine, what else is there which is left for the Devil to do.

H

 
The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 
The prophet disdains those for whom God's presence is a comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand. ~ Abraham Joshua Heschel
 
The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation. ~ Max Horkheimer
 
The best way to worship God is to love your wife. ~ Victor Hugo
  • Give according to your means, or God will make your means according to your giving.
  • Maybe God isn't the sex police, Richard. Sometimes I think Christians get all hung up on the sex thing because it's easier to worry about sex than to ask yourself, am I a good person? […] It makes it easy to be cruel, because as long as you're not fucking around, nothing you do can be that bad. Is that really all you think of God?
  • No matter how much I probe and prod,
      I cannot quite believe in God;
    But oh, I hope to God that He
      Unswervingly believes in me.
  • To the extent that we are free we are like God, who has no need of an idea of a God over Godself or of an incentive other than the moral law itself. But to the extent that we are also natural beings, we desire our own happiness in everything else that we desire, and we need the practical postulate of God to bring that happiness together with morality.
    • John E. Hare, “Ethics and Religion: Two Kantian Arguments,” Philosophical Investigations, vol. 34, no. 2 (April 2011), p. 165
  • The objects of philosophy, it is true, are upon the whole the same as those of religion. In both the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.
  • God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent — it says so right here on the label. If you have a mind capable of believing all three of these divine attributes simultaneously, I have a wonderful bargain for you. No checks, please. Cash and in small bills.
  • The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.
    The second most preposterous notion is that copulation is inherently sinful.
  • How much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in his divine system of creation?
  • Restore to God His due in tithe and time;
    A tithe purloin'd cankers the whole estate.
  • The prophet disdains those for whom God's presence is a comfort and security; to him it is a challenge, an incessant demand.
  • Religious ideas, supposedly private matters between man and god, are in practice always political ideas.
    • Christopher Hitchens, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish, Chatto Counterblasts (1990)
  • Only a humorless tyrant could want a perpetual chanting of praises that, one has no choice but to assume, would be the innate virtues and splendors furnished him by his creator, infinite regression, drowned in praise!
  • Consciousness is Gods' gift to mankind.
  • God only speaks to those who understand the language
  • The concept of God was for a long time the place where the idea was kept alive that there are other norms besides those to which nature and society give expression in their operation.
    • Max Horkheimer, "Thoughts on Religion," Critical Theory: Selected Essays (1995), p. 129
  • The significance of God, cause, number, substance or soul consists, as James asserts, in nothing but the tendency of the given concept to make us act or think. If the world should reach a point at which it ceases to care not only about such metaphysical entities but also about murders perpetrated behind closed frontiers or simply in the dark, one would have to conclude that the concepts of such murders have no meaning, that they represent no ‘distinct ideas’ or truths, since they do not make any ‘sensible difference to anybody.’
  • Nothing could be more untrue than the often-repeated statement that we all worship the same God; or that other, that whatever we worship the result is the same.
  • The best way to worship God is to love your wife.
    • Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), page 1190, as translated by Charles Wilbour and provided by A.L. Bert Publishers. Source: Shawn Thomas (June 24, 2013): Quotes & Illustrations From Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. Archived from the original on March 11, 2023.
  • The Savage interrupted him. "But isn't it natural to feel there's a God?"
    "You might as well ask if it's natural to do up one's trousers with zippers," said the Controller sarcastically. "You remind me of another of those old fellows called Bradley. He defined philosophy as the finding of bad reason for what one believes by instinct. As if one believed anything by instinct! One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them. Finding bad reasons for what one believes for other bad reasons–that's philosophy. People believe in God because they've been conditioned to.
    "But all the same," insisted the Savage, "it is natural to believe in God when you're alone–quite alone, in the night, thinking about death …"
    "But people never are alone now," said Mustapha Mond. "We make them hate solitude; and we arrange their lives so that it's almost impossible for them ever to have it."
  • Why did it occur to anyone to believe in only one God? And conversely why did it ever occur to anyone to believe in many gods? To both these questions we must return the same answer: Because that is how the human mind happens to work. For the human mind is both diverse and simple, simultaneously many and one. We have an immediate perception of our own diversity and of that of the outside world. And at the same time we have immediate perceptions of our own oneness.
  • Operationally, God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a cosmic Cheshire cat.

I

  • Would God give a bird wings and make it a crime to fly? Would he give me brains and make it a crime to think? Any God that would damn one of his children for the expression of his honest thought wouldn't make a decent thief. When I read a book and don't believe it, I ought to say so. I will do so and take the consequences like a man.
  • God is dead. Marx is dead. And I don’t feel so well myself.
    • Eugène Ionesco, as quoted in Jewish American Literature : A Norton Anthology (2000) by Jules Chametzky, "Jewish Humor", p. 318

J

 
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High. ~ Jesus
 
The God who gave us life, gave us liberty at the same time. ~ Thomas Jefferson
 
It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. ~ Thomas Jefferson
 
Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. ~ Thomas Jefferson
  • The theory of an existing and benevolent god simply doesn't make sense to anyone who is rational. A benevolent and omnipotent god would never allow such imbalances as I see to exist for one second. If by chance I am wrong, however I must then assume that being born black called for some automatic punishment for sins I know nothing about, and being innocent it behooves me to defy god.
    • George Jackson, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson
  • God's on your side? Shit, I'm alright with that. Because we're going to reload the clips and come right back.
  • It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
  • Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are a gift of God? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.
  • Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.
    • Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to his nephew Peter Carr from Paris, France, (10 August 1787)
  • No historical fact is better established, than that the doctrine of one God, pure and uncompounded, was that of the early ages of Christianity … Nor was the unity of the Supreme Being ousted from the Christian creed by the force of reason, but by the sword of civil government, wielded at the will of the fanatic Athanasius.
  • The doctrines of Jesus are simple, and tend all to the happiness of man.
1. That there is one only God, and he all perfect.
2. That there is a future state of rewards and punishments.
3. That to love God with all thy heart and thy neighbor as thyself, is the sum of religion.

*I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.

  • Some foolish men declare that creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill advised and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was he before the creation? If you say he was transcendent then and needed no support, where is he now? How could God have made this world without any raw material? If you say that he made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression. If you declare that this raw material arose naturally you fall into another fallacy, For the whole universe might thus have been its own creator, and have arisen quite naturally. If God created the world by an act of his own will, without any raw material, then it is just his will and nothing else — and who will believe this silly nonsense? If he is ever perfect and complete, how could the will to create have arisen in him? If, on the other hand, he is not perfect, he could no more create the universe than a potter could. If he is form-less, action-less and all-embracing, how could he have created the world? Such a soul, devoid of all morality, would have no desire to create anything. If he is perfect, he does not strive for the three aims of man, so what advantage would he gain by creating the universe? If you say that he created to no purpose because it was his nature to do so, then God is pointless. If he created in some kind of sport, it was the sport of a foolish child, leading to trouble. If he created because of the karma of embodied beings [acquired in a previous creation] He is not the Almighty Lord, but subordinate to something else. If out of love for living beings and need of them he made the world, why did he not take creation wholly blissful free from misfortune? If he were transcendent he would not create, for he would be free: Nor if involved in transmigration, for then he would not be almighty. Thus the doctrine that the world was created by God makes no sense at all, And God commits great sin in slaying the children whom he himself created. If you say that he slays only to destroy evil beings, why did he create such beings in the first place? Good men should combat the believer in divine creation, maddened by an evil doctrine. Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning or end, and is based on the principles, life and rest. Uncreated and indestructible, it endures under the compulsion of its own nature.
  • The very pure spirit does not bother about the regard of others or human respect, but communes inwardly with God, alone and in solitude as to all forms, and with delightful tranquility, for the knowledge of God is received in divine silence.
    • St. John of the Cross in The Sayings of Light and Love as translated by Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodriguez (1991)
  • God is a dark night to man in this life.
  • God is all that is good, as to my sight, and the goodness that each thing hath, it is He.
  • God willeth that we endlessly hate the sin and endlessly love the soul, as God loveth it.
  • Truth seeth God, and Wisdom beholdeth God, and of these two cometh the third: that is, a holy marvellous delight in God; which is Love. Where Truth and Wisdom are verily, there is Love verily, coming of them both. And all of God’s making: for He is endless sovereign Truth, endless sovereign Wisdom, endless sovereign Love, unmade; and man’s Soul is a creature in God which hath the same properties made, and evermore it doeth that it was made for: it seeth God, it beholdeth God, and it loveth God. Whereof God enjoyeth in the creature; and the creature in God, endlessly marvelling.
    In which marvelling he seeth his God, his Lord, his Maker so high, so great, and so good, in comparison with him that is made, that scarcely the creature seemeth ought to the self. But the clarity and the clearness of Truth and Wisdom maketh him to see and to bear witness that he is made for Love, in which God endlessly keepeth him.
  • Highly ought we to rejoice that God dwelleth in our soul, and much more highly ought we to rejoice that our soul dwelleth in God. Our soul is made to be God’s dwelling-place; and the dwelling-place of the soul is God, Which is unmade. And high understanding it is, inwardly to see and know that God, which is our Maker, dwelleth in our soul; and an higher understanding it is, inwardly to see and to know that our soul, that is made, dwelleth in God’s Substance: of which Substance, God, we are that we are.
    And I saw no difference between God and our Substance: but as it were all God; and yet mine understanding took that our Substance is in God: that is to say, that God is God, and our Substance is a creature in God.
  • I beheld with reverent dread, and highly marvelling in the sight and in the feeling of the sweet accord, that our Reason is in God; understanding that it is the highest gift that we have received; and it is grounded in nature.
  • I saw full surely that ere God made us He loved us; which love was never slacked, nor ever shall be. And in this love He hath done all His works; and in this love He hath made all things profitable to us; and in this love our life is everlasting. In our making we had beginning; but the love wherein He made us was in Him from without beginning: in which love we have our beginning. And all this shall we see in God, without end.
  • A god is usually characteristic of a certain system of thought or morality. For instance, take the Christian God, the summum bonum: God is love, love being the highest moral principle; and God is spirit, the spirit being the supreme idea of meaning. All our Christian moral concepts derive from such assumptions, and the supreme essence of all of them is what we call God.

K

  • May His great Name be blessed forever and ever.
    • The Kaddish Prayer: A new translation with a commentary anthologized from Talmudic, Midrashic and Rabbinic sources. New York: Mesorah Publications, Ltd., 2001, ISBN 0-89906-160-5, p.7
  • The wish to talk to God is absurd. We cannot talk to one we cannot comprehend — and we cannot comprehend God
    • Immanuel Kant, A lecture at Königsberg (1775), as quoted in A New Dictionary of Quotations on Historical Principles from Ancient and Modern Sources (1946) by H. L. Mencken, p. 955
  • We are to love God, not for the gifts bestowed upon us but for the sake of love itself.
  • The Christian God is spirit and Christianity is spirit, and there is discord between the flesh and the spirit but the flesh is not the sensuous-it is the selfish. In this sense, even the spiritual can become sensuous-for example, if a person took his spiritual gifts in vain, he would then be carnal. And of course I know that it is not necessary for the Christian that Christ must have been physically beautiful; and it would be grievous-for a reason different from the one you give-because if beauty were some essential, how the believer would long to see him; but from all this it by no means follows that the sensuous is annihilated in Christianity.
  • If everything is assumed to be in order with regard to the Holy Scriptures-what then? Has the person who did not believe come a single step closer to faith? No, not a single step. Faith does not result from straightforward scholarly deliberation, nor does it come directly; on the contrary, in this objectivity one loses that infinite, personal, impassioned interestedness, which is the condition of faith, the everywhere and nowhere in which faith can come into existence. Has the person who did believe gained anything with regard to the power and strength of faith? No, not in the least; in this prolix knowledge, in this certainty that lurks at faith’s door and craves for it, he is rather in such a precarious position that much effort, much fear and trembling will be needed lest he fall into temptation and confuse knowledge with faith. Whereas up to now faith has been a beneficial taskmaster in uncertainty, but it would be its worst enemy in this certainty. If passion is taken away, faith no longer exists, and certainty and passion do not hitch up as a team.
    • Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846) as translated by Hong, p. 29
  • To live only in the unconditional, to breathe only the unconditional – the human being cannot do this; he perishes like a fish that must live in the air. But on the other hand a human being cannot in the deeper sense live without relating himself to the unconditional; he expires, that is, perhaps goes on living, but spiritlessly. Thus the single individual must personally relate himself to the unconditional. I believed, and do believe, that this is Christianity and love for “the neighbor.”
    • The Point of View On My Work As An Author by Soren Kierkegaard (finished 1848) published by Peter Christian Kierkegaard 1859 translated by Howard and Edna Hong 1998 Princeton University Press P. 19-20
  • God is cruel, sometimes he makes you live.
  • God said take what you want ... and pay for it.
    • Stephen King, Desperation, said by the character "Johnny Marinville"
  • God is always, more or less, a custodian God: He is some sort of a 'cause' to the social or political group that 'recognises' His Authority. He is the one who guarantees continuity ('filiation') – that is to say, the unity of the group – and fixes its 'personality', its 'individuality' (that is distinct from others), by determining its origin. Hence the 'traditional' character of the divinity of the (sacred) divine: God is always the God of ancestors ('the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob'). Hence also the (sacred) divine character of every 'tradition': the past that determines the present is generally reduced, eventually, to a divine origin.
  • According to logic 'nothing" is that of which everything can truly be denied and nothing can truly be affirmed. The idea therefore either of a finite or infinite nothing is a contradiction in terms. And yet according to theologians "God the self existent being is a most simple, unchangeable, incorruptible being; without parts, figure, motion, divisibility, or any other such properties as we find in matter. For all such things so plainly and necessarily imply finiteness in their very notion and are utterly inconsistent with complete infinity." Therefore the God here offered to the adoration of the XlXth century lacks every quality upon which man's mind is capable of fixing any judgment. What is this in fact but a being of whom they can affirm nothing that is not instantly contradicted. Their own Bible their Revelation destroys all the moral perceptions they heap upon him unless indeed they call those qualities perfections that every other man's reason and common sense call imperfections, odious vices and brutal wickedness. Nay more he who reads our Buddhist scriptures written for the superstitious masses will fail to find in them a demon so vindictive, unjust, so cruel and so stupid as the celestial tyrant upon whom the Christians prodigally lavish their servile worship and on whom their theologians heap those perfections that are contradicted on every page of their Bible. Truly and veritably your theology has created her God but to destroy him piecemeal. Your church is the fabulous Saturn, who begets children but to devour them.
  • Alex: You needn't take it any further, sir. You've proved to me that all this ultraviolence and killing is wrong, wrong, and terribly wrong. I've learned me lesson, sir. I've seen now what I've never seen before. I'm cured! Praise god!
  • The important point is that all the standard attributes assigned to God in our history could equally well be the characteristics of biological entities who billions of years ago were at a stage of development similar to man's own and evolved into something as remote from man as man is remote from the primordial ooze from which he first emerged.

L

 
One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. ~ Madeleine L'Engle
 
The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. ~ Abraham Lincoln
  • It isn't always the middle-aged who refuse to listen, who will not even try to understand another point of view. One boy would not get it through his head that for all adults God is not an old man in a white beard sitting on a cloud. As far as this boy was concerned, this old gentleman was the adult's god, and therefore he did not believe in God.
  • I don't believe in God, but I have this idea that if there were a God, or destiny of some kind looking down on us, that if he saw you taking anything for granted he’d take it away. So he'll be like: 'You think this is going pretty well?' Then he'll go and send down some big disaster.
    • Hugh Laurie Stargazing: Heather's Angry, Jane is Ill, Hugh is Anxious Kansas City Star, Wed, Oct. 31, 2007
  • God is only a great imaginative experience.
    • D.H. Lawrence, Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D. H. Lawrence (1936) pt. 4, edited by E. McDonald
  • God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
  • The more we get to know about our universe ... the more the hypothesis that there is a Creator God, who designed the universe for a purpose, gains in credibility as the best explanation of why we are here.
    • John Lennox, cited in Awake! magazine, 2010, 11/10, article: Has Science Done Away With God?
  • Secondly, getting rid of God does not get rid of the suffering. In fact, it can make the pain worse since it gets rid of all ultimate hope and justice. Horgan denies this in his last sentence, but I still maintain he has no ultimate personal hope to offer for anyone, including himself. The vast majority of people who have ever lived have suffered and not received justice in this life. Since, according to atheism, death is the end, then these people will never receive justice since there is no life to come. I applaud Horgan’s positive reaction to what we have achieved in overcoming disease, poverty, oppression and war, but that does not affect my point in the slightest.
    Whether God could have made a world in which fire warmed but didn’t burn and there were no destructive earthquakes is difficult. After all, earthquakes are paradoxically essential for the maintenance of life. Certainly, God could have made a world in which there was no moral evil. But there would have been no humans in it--it would be a robotic world. The greatest God-given capacity we humans have is the capacity to love. It inevitably carries with it the capacity to hate. Hence the world presents us all with a mixed picture – beauty and barbed wire.
  • Is it not better to place a question mark upon a problem while seeking an answer than to put the label "God" there and consider the matter solved? Does not the word "God" only confuse and make more difficult the solution by assuming a conclusion that is utterly groundless and palpably absurd?
  • His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to him, but not nonsense. This is no limit to his power. If you choose to say 'God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,' you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words 'God can.'... It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of his creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because his power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.
  • I am much indebted to the good christian people of the country for their constant prayers and consolations; and to no one of them, more than to yourself. The purposes of the Almighty are perfect, and must prevail, though we erring mortals may fail to accurately perceive them in advance. We hoped for a happy termination of this terrible war long before this; but God knows best, and has ruled otherwise. We shall yet acknowledge His wisdom and our own error therein. Meanwhile we must work earnestly in the best light He gives us, trusting that so working still conduces to the great ends He ordains. Surely He intends some great good to follow this mighty convulsion, which no mortal could make, and no mortal could stay.
    • Abraham Lincoln's Letter to Eliza Gurney (4 September 1864); quoted in Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 7 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 535
  • I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God.
    • Abraham Lincoln, Recollection by Gilbert J. Greene, quoted in The Speaking Oak (1902) by Ferdinand C. Iglehart and Latest Light on Abraham Lincoln (1917) by Ervin S. Chapman
  • I know there is a God, and that He hates injustice and slavery. I see the storm coming, and I know that His hand is in it. If He has a place and work for me–and I think He has–I believe I am ready. I am nothing, but truth is everything. I know I am right because I know that liberty is right, for Christ teaches it, and Christ is God. I have told them that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and Christ and reason say the same; and they will find it so. Douglas doesn't care whether slavery is voted up or voted down, but God cares, and humanity cares, and I care; and with God’s help I shall not fail. I may not see the end; but it will come and I shall be vindicated; and these men will find that they have not read their Bibles aright.
  • Faith in a distant, ephemeral God, solver of problems by house call, has also been left behind. Increasingly I come to understand my religion and priesthood as a committment to the society in which I live. A committment to men and women who struggle for a new social order where slavery has no place, that prepares people to fully realize themselves, in which injustice and exploitation cease to be our daily bread. I understand Jesus Christ as very related to this matter. I understand Jesus Christ as each one of my brothers and sisters. I understand that in uniting with them in this struggle, perhaps I will be capable of overcoming the small and large personal needs that are only relevant because they impede me from fully giving myself to this task.
    • Antonio Llidó letter to a friend on March 9, 1971 (from the book Antonio Llidó: Epistolario de un compromiso,Tàndem Edicons,España (1999) ISBN 84-8131-227-4.
  • It is the duty of nations, as well as of men, to own their dependence upon the overruling power of God, to confess their sins and transgressions, in humble sorrow, yet with assured hope that genuine repentance will lead to mercy and pardon, and to recognize the sublime truths announced in the Holy Scriptures, and proven by all history, that those nations only are blessed whose God is the Lord.
    • Abraham Lincoln, Proclamation for a Day of Fasting, Humiliation and Prayer (30 March 1863)
  • An' you've gut to git up airly
    Ef you want to take in God.

M

 
To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name. ~ Thomas Merton
  • But the thing that's really disturbing about Noah isn't the silly, it's that it's immoral. It's about a psychotic mass murderer who gets away with it, and his name is God. Genesis says God was so angry with himself for screwing up when he made mankind so flawed (grr!), that he sent the flood to kill everyone. Everyone. Men, women, children, babies.
    What kind of tyrant punishes everyone just to get back at the few he's mad at? I mean, besides Chris Christie. Hey God, you know you're kind of a dick when you are in a movie with Russell Crowe, and you're the one with anger issues. You know, conservatives are always going on about how Americans are losing their values and their morality. Well, maybe it's because you worship a guy who drowns babies.
  • We are all attached to the throne of the Supreme Being by a supple chain that restrains us without enslaving us. Nothing is more admirable in the universal order of things than the action of free beings under the divine hand. Freely slaves, they act voluntarily and necessarily at the same time; they really do what they will, but without being able to disturb the general plans. Each of these beings occupies the centre of a sphere of activity whose diameter varies according to the will of the Eternal Geometer, who can extend, restrict, check, or direct the will without altering its nature.
  • The Eternal turned his attention to the three shades who stood humbly and yet hopefully before him. The quick, with so short a time to live, when they talk of themselves, talk too much; but the dead, with eternity before them, are so verbose that only angels could listen to them with civility.
  • If, it was natural to reason, God punishes men with eternal torment, it is surely lawful for men to use doses of it in a good cause.
  • God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in his arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos; He will set them above their betters.
  • To say that I am made in the image of God is to say that Love is the reason for my existence, for God is love.
    Love is my true identity. Selflessness is my true self. Love is my true character. Love is my name.
  • Persons are not known by intellect alone, not by principles alone, but only by love. It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who he is, and who we are. It is only this realization that can open to us the real nature of our duty, and of right action.
  • O God, we are one with You. You have made us one with You. You have taught us that if we are open to one another, You dwell in us. Help us to preserve this openness and to fight for it with all our hearts. Help us to realize that there can be no understanding where there is mutual rejection. O God, in accepting one another wholeheartedly, fully, completely, we accept You, and we thank You, and we adore You, and we love You with our whole being, because our being is Your being, our spirit is rooted in Your spirit. Fill us then with love, and let us be bound together with love as we go our diverse ways, united in this one spirit which makes You present in the world, and which makes You witness to the ultimate reality that is love. Love has overcome. Love is victorious. Amen.
    • Thomas Merton, in his closing prayer to an informal address delivered in Calcutta, India (October 1968), from The Asian Journal of Thomas Merton (1975); quoted in Thomas Merton, Spiritual Master : The Essential Writings (1992), p. 237
  • What in me is dark,
    Illumine; what is low, raise and support;
    That to the height of this great argument
    I may assert eternal Providence,
    And justify the ways of God to men.
  • Bright and clear mind — that we call God.
  • God is living in people's hearts, and in God there is no distinction or rank. Therefore God lives in everyone. That's why traditionally it is said that all deities are the same. They say God comes to a person who is very humble and honest.
  • There is a very good saying that if triangles invented a god, they would make him three-sided.
  • If there is anything so precious that without it history and the world will be destroyed, where will you keep it? You will naturally want to keep it in the deepest part of your mind. If you desire to place it in the depths of your mind, it needs to be invisible. It is for this very reason that God exists as an invisible being. It is fortunate that He is invisible, for if He were visible how could a great contest to gain Him be avoided? It would be difficult for God to endure the pain of seeing it.
  • If God is merciful, He provides us with little evidence.
  • ...indeed, if there were any modesty left in mankind, the histories of the Bible might abundantly assure men of the existence of angels and spirits... I look upon it as a special piece of Providence that . . . fresh examples of apparitions may awaken our benumbed and lethargic minds into an assurance that there are other intelligent beings besides those that are clothed in heavy earth or clay . . . for this evidence, showing that there are bad spirits, will necessarily open a door to the belief that there are good ones, and lastly, that there is a God.
    • Henry More, quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, (1877)
  • God isn’t in the details, He’s in the structure.

N

 
A Buddhist meditator, while benefiting from the refinement of consciousness he has achieved, will be able to see these meditative experiences for what they are; and he will further know that they are without any abiding substance that could be attributed to a deity manifesting itself to his mind. ~ Nyanaponika Thera
  • The appeal to a religious meaning to life is a bit different. If you believe that the meaning of your life comes from fulfilling the purpose of God, who loves you, and seeing Him in eternity, then it doesn't seem appropriate to ask, "And what is the point of that?"It's supposed to be something which is its own point, and can't have a purpose outside itself. But for this very reason it has its own problems.
    The idea of God seems to be the idea of something that can explain everything else, without having to be explained itself. But it's very hard to understand how there could be such a thing. If we ask the question, "Why is the world like this?" and are offered a religious answer, how can we be prevented from asking again, "And why is that true?" What kind of answer would bring all of our "Why?" questions to a stop, once and for all? And if they can stop there, why couldn't they have stopped earlier?
    The same problem seems to arise if God and His purposes are offered as the ultimate explanation of the value and meaning of our lives. The idea that our lives fulfil God's purpose is supposed to give them their point, in a way that doesn't require or admit of any further point. One isn't supposed to ask "What is the point of God?" any more than one is supposed to ask, "What is the explanation of God?"
    But my problem here, as with the role of God as ultimate explanation, is that I'm not sure I understand the idea. Can there really be something which gives point to everything else by encompassing it, but which couldn't have, or need, any point itself? Something whose point can't be questioned from outside because there is no outside?
    If God is supposed to give our lives a meaning that we can't understand, it's not much of a consolation. God as ultimate justification, like God as ultimate explanation, may be an incomprehensible answer to a question that we can't get rid of. On the other hand, maybe that's the whole point, and I am just failing to understand religious ideas. Perhaps the belief in God is the belief that the universe is intelligible, but not to US.
    • Thomas Nagel, What Does It All Mean?: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy (1987), Ch. 10. The Meaning of Life
  • It behooves man to take to heart who it is that hath created him, and who hath developed him from a foul-smelling drop in the womb of woman, who hath brought him to the light of the world, who hath given sight to his eyes, and who hath bestowed the power of motion upon his feet, who maketh him to stand upright, who hath infused the breath of life into him, and who hath imparted of His own pure spirit unto him. Happy the man, therefore, that polluteth not the holy spirit of God within him by doing evil deeds, and well for him if he returns it to his Creator as he received it."
    • Naphtali son of Jacob, as cited in Legends of the Jews (1909)
  • The Ultimate Truth is called God. This one can realize in the state of Nirvikalpa Samadhi. A circle can have only one centre but it can have numerous radii. The centre can be compared to God and the radii to religions. So, no one sect, no one religion or book can make an absolute claim of It. He who works for It gets It.
  • The poor is almost always seen to have a prophetic capacity: not only is the poor in the world, but the poor is the very possibility of the world. Only the poor lives radically the actual and present being, in destitution and suffering, and thus only the poor has the ability to renew being. The divinity of the multitude of the poor does not point to any transcendence. On the contrary, here and only here in this world, in the existence of the poor, is the field of immanence presented, confirmed, consolidated, and opened. The poor is god on earth.
  • This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being. This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all, and on account of His dominion He is wont to be called Lord God, Universal Ruler.
  • All these things being considered, it seems probable to me, that God in the beginning formed matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable particles, of such sizes and figures, and with such other properties, and in such proportion to space, as most conduced to the end for which he formed them; and that these primitive particles, being solids, are incomparably harder than any porous bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary power being able to divide what God himself made one in the first creation.
  • A Heavenly Master governs all the world as Sovereign of the universe. We are astonished at Him by reason of His perfection, we honor Him and fall down before Him because of His unlimited power. From blind physical necessity, which is always and everywhere the same, no variety adhering to time and place could evolve, and all variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, Whom I call the Lord God.
    • Isaac Newton, as quoted in Our Humanist Heritage (2010) by George Frater, p. 75
  • You see what it was that really triumphed over the Christian God: Christian morality itself, the concept of truthfulness that was understood more rigorously, the father confessor’s refinement of the Christian conscience, translated and sublimated into a scientific conscience, into intellectual cleanliness at any price.
  • Gott ist eine Mutmaßung; aber ich will, daß euer Mutmaßen nicht weiter reiche, als euer schaffender Wille.
    • God is an assumption; but I want your assuming to reach no further than your creative will.
  • Gott ist ein Gedanke, der macht alles Gerade krumm.
    • God is a thought which makes crooked all that is straight.
  • God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.
    • Friedrich Nietzsche, in The Gay Science (1882), section 125
    • The reduction of Nietzsche's thought to … the first-liner of a graffito sometimes found in certain modern tiled cells and catacombs:
God is dead — Nietzsche
Nietzsche is dead — God
This reduction could appear to be the creative interpretation of masterful will to power — if Nietzsche's thought and style are as uncontrolled as the critics suggest. … Nietzsche himself anticipates the strife of revengeful graffiti at the conclusion of his text: "Wherever there are walls I shall inscribe this eternal accusation against Christianity upon them — I can write in letters which make even the blind see." …Nietzsche says in his preface that his readers must have a "predestination for the labyrinth" and "new ears for new music" if they are to understand this difficult writing.
  • Gary Shapiro in Nietzschean Narratives (1989), p. 126
  • I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.
  • "Will to truth" does not mean "I do not want to let myself be deceived" but—there is no alternative—"I will not deceive, not even myself"; and with that we stand on moral ground. ... You will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato's faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine.
  • What differentiates us is not that we find no God—neither in history, nor in nature, nor behind nature—but that we do not feel that what has been revered as God is ‘god-like.’
  • God is a mean kid sitting on an anthill with a magnifying glass, and I'm the ant. He could fix my life in five minutes if He wanted to, but he'd rather tear off my feelers and watch me squirm.
  • There probably is a God. Many things are easier to explain if there is than if there isn't.
    • John von Neumann, as quoted in John Von Neumann : The Scientific Genius Who Pioneered the Modern Computer , Game Theory, Nuclear Deterrence and Much More (1992) by Norman Macrae, p. 379
  • After rising from deep meditative absorption (jhāna), the Buddhist meditator is advised to view the physical and mental factors constituting his experience in the light of the three characteristics of all conditioned existence: impermanence, liability to suffering, and absence of an abiding ego or eternal substance. This is done primarily in order to utilize the meditative purity and strength of consciousness for the highest purpose: liberating insight. But this procedure also has a very important side effect which concerns us here: the meditator will not be overwhelmed by any uncontrolled emotions and thoughts evoked by his singular experience, and will thus be able to avoid interpretations of that experience not warranted by the facts.
    Hence a Buddhist meditator, while benefiting from the refinement of consciousness he has achieved, will be able to see these meditative experiences for what they are; and he will further know that they are without any abiding substance that could be attributed to a deity manifesting itself to his mind.

O

  • Near: Nobody can say what is right and what is wrong, what is righteous and what is evil. Even if there is a God, and I had his teachings before me, I would think it through and decide if that was right or wrong myself.
  • Can omniscient God, who
    Knows the future, find
    The Omnipotence to
    Change His future mind?
  • Having refuted, then, as well as we could, every notion which might suggest that we were to think of God as in any degree corporeal, we go on to say that, according to strict truth, God is incomprehensible, and incapable of being measured. For whatever be the knowledge which we are able to obtain of God, either by perception or reflection, we must of necessity believe that He is by many degrees far better than what we perceive Him to be.
    • Origen On First Principles, Bk. 1, ch. 1; par. 5
  • Cura pii Dis sunt, & qui coluere coluntur.
    • Heaven rewards the pious; those who cherish God
      Themselves are cherished.
    • Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIIL, 725

P

 
The God who made the world and everything that is in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything... we also are His descendants. ~ Paul of Tarsus
 
It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived. ~ George S. Patton, Jr.
 
I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from. ~ Terry Pratchett
  • Thus, to the fourth question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism, "What is God?", the answer read as follows: God is a Spirit, infinite, eternal and uncheangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice and truth.
This statement the great Charles Hodge described as "probably the best definition of God ever penned by a man." (p. 21).
The Book of Daniel tells us about the wisdom, might and truth oft he great God who rules history and shows his sovereignty in acts of judgement and mercy towards individuals and nations according to his own pleasure (p. 29).
  • Those of us who are Gnostics believe that all people are ultimately saved and that God always loves us, no matter what we do. These beliefs are true, but they can very easily be simplified and misunderstood. God is never angry with us in the way in which a vengeful human would reject us, but God’s love for us has a dark side and one which we should rightfully fear. God loves us not in a sentimental way which aims at our ease and pleasure but, rather in a way which aims at our highest good and with an intensity which no one, even the highest angels, can understand. God is absolutely determined, with an infinite determination, to rid us of all that does not reflect His Goodness. As one of our hymns puts it,
“But unto wrong what is His Name?
Our God is a consuming flame
To every wrong beneath the sun!”
And, because of that, God’s punishments are terrible, and it is wise to fear them.
  • FEU. Dieu d'Abraham, Dieu d'Isaac, Dieu de Jacob, non des philosophes et savants. Certitude. Certitude. Sentiment. Joie. Paix.
    • FIRE. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars. Certainty. Certainty. Feeling. Joy. Peace.
    • Blaise Pascal, Note on a parchment stitched to the lining of Pascal's coat, found by a servant shortly after his death, as quoted in Burkitt Speculum religionis (1929), p. 150
  • Compare not thyself with others, but with Me. If thou dost not find Me in those with whom thou comparest thyself, thou comparest thyself to one who is abominable. If thou findest Me in them, compare thyself to Me. But whom wilt thou compare? Thyself, or Me in thee? If it is thyself, it is one who is abominable. If it is I, thou comparest Me to Myself. Now I am God in all.
  • Posterity will one day laugh at the foolishness of modern materialistic philosophers. The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator. I pray while I am engaged at my work in the laboratory.
    • Louis Pasteur, as quoted in The Literary Digest (18 October 1902)
  • The more I study nature, the more I stand amazed at the work of the Creator.
    • Louis Pasteur, as quoted in The Literary Digest (18 October 1902)
  • Science, which brings man nearer to God
    • Louis Pasteur, quoted in René Vallery-Radot, The Life of Pasteur (1902), vol. 1, p. 194
  • It is foolish and wrong to mourn the men who died. Rather we should thank God that such men lived..
    • General George S. Patton, Jr., in a speech at the Copley Plaza Hotel, Boston Massachusetts (7 June 1945), quoted in Patton : Ordeal and Triumph (1970) by Ladislas Farago
 
You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters... Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction. ~ Plato
  • So Paul stood... and said, “Men of Athens, I see that you are very religious in all respects... while I was... examining the objects of your worship, I also found an altar with this inscription, ‘TO AN UNKNOWN GOD.’ Therefore... you worship in ignorance, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything that is in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made by hands; nor is He served by human hands, as though He needed anything, since He Himself gives to all people life and breath and all things; and He made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth... that they would seek God, if perhaps they might feel around for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and exist...‘For we also are His descendants.’ Therefore, since we are the descendants of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, an image formed by human skill and thought. So having overlooked the times of ignorance, God is now proclaiming to mankind that all people everywhere are to repent because He has set a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness...
  • A year spent in artificial intelligence is enough to make one believe in God.
  • The hypothesis of God is a peculiar one, in that it supposes an infinitely incomprehensible object, although every hypothesis, as such, supposes its object to be truly conceived in the hypothesis. This leaves the hypothesis but one way of understanding itself; namely, as vague yet as true so far as it is definite, and as continually tending to define itself more and more, and without limit. The hypothesis, being thus itself inevitably subject to the law of growth, appears in its vagueness to represent God as so, albeit this is directly contradicted in the hypothesis from its very first phase. But this apparent attribution of growth to God, since it is ineradicable from the hypothesis, cannot, according to the hypothesis, be flatly false. Its implications concerning the Universes will be maintained in the hypothesis, while its implications concerning God will be partly disavowed, and yet held to be less false than their denial would be. Thus the hypothesis will lead to our thinking of features of each Universe as purposed; and this will stand or fall with the hypothesis. Yet a purpose essentially involves growth, and so cannot be attributed to God. Still it will, according to the hypothesis, be less false to speak so than to represent God as purposeless.
  • All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.
  • You are young, my son, and, as the years go by, time will change and even reverse many of your present opinions. Refrain therefore awhile from setting yourself up as a judge of the highest matters... Not one of them who took up in his youth with this opinion that there are no gods ever continued until old age faithful to his conviction.
  • God is truth and light his shadow.
  • God is a geometrician.
    • Attributed to Plato, but not found in his works
  • Laugh where we must, be candid where we can,
    But vindicate the ways of God to man.
  • Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
    Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind.
  • To Him no high, no low, no great, no small;
    He fills, He bounds, connects and equals all!
  • An honest man's the noblest work of God.
  • Slave to no sect, who takes no private road,
    But looks through Nature up to Nature's God.
  • I don't think I've found God, but I may have seen where gods come from.
    • Terry Pratchett, in "I create gods all the time - now I think one might exist, says fantasy author Terry Pratchett" in The Daily Mail (21 June 2008)
  • The first act of man, filled and carried away with enthusiasm (of the divine breath), is to adore the invisible Providence on which he feels that he depends, and which he calls GOD.
  • Indeed the inscrutable One is out of the reach of every rational process.
    Nor can any words come up to the inexpressible Good, this One, this Source of all unity, this super-existent Being.
    Mind beyond mind, word beyond speech, it is gathered up by no discourse, by no intuition, by no name.
    It is and it is as no other being is.
    • Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, 1, 1

Q

R

 
The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation. ~ John Ray
 
If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron. ~ Spider Robinson
 
In the presence of infinite might and infinite wisdom, the strength of the strongest man is but weakness, and the keenest of mortal eyes see but dimly. ~ Theodore Roosevelt
 
There are proofs of Your existence. I had forgotten them all, and never demanded any either, for what an overwhelming obligation would come with this certainty. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
 
Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him? ~ Rainer Maria Rilke
  • All true knowledge of God begins with the knowledge of his hiddenness.
    • Gerhard von Rad, Old Testament Theology. Volume II: The Theology of Israel's Prophetic Traditions (1960). Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001, p. 377
  • He who is called Brahman by the jnanis is known as Atman by the yogis and as Bhagavan by the bhaktas. The same brahmin is called priest, when worshipping in the temple, and cook, when preparing a meal in the kitchen. The jnani, following the path of knowledge, always reason about the Reality saying, "not this, not this." Brahman is neither "this" nor "that"; It is neither the universe nor its living beings. Reasoning in this way, the mind becomes steady. Finally it disappears and the aspirant goes into samadhi. This is the Knowledge of Brahman. It is the unwavering conviction of the jnani that Brahman alone is real and the world is illusory. All these names and forms are illusory, like a dream. What Brahman is cannot be described. One cannot even say that Brahman is a Person. This is the opinion of the jnanis, the followers of Vedanta. But the bhaktas accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don't think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of the God's power and glory. God has created all these — sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men, animals. They constitute His glory. He is within us, in our hearts. Again, He is outside. The most advanced devotees say that He Himself has become all this — the 24 cosmic principles, the universe, and all living beings. The devotee of God wants to eat sugar, and not become sugar. (All laugh.) Do you know how a lover of God feels? His attitude is: "O God, Thou art the Master, and I am Thy servant. Thou art the Mother, and I Thy child." Or again: "Thou art my Father and Mother. Thou art the Whole, and I am a part." He does not like to say, "I am Brahman." They yogi seeks to realize the Paramatman, the Supreme Soul. His ideal is the union of the embodied soul and the Supreme Soul. He withdraws his mind from sense objects and tries to concentrate on the Paramatman. Therefore, during the first stage of his spiritual discipline, he retires into solitude and with undivided attention practices meditation in a fixed posture.
    But the reality is one and the same; the difference is only in name. He who is Brahman is verily Atman, and again, He is the Bhagavan. He is Brahman to the followers of the path of knowledge, Paramatman to the yogis, and Bhagavan to the lovers of God.
    • Ramakrishna, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna (1942), p. 132
  • Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
    • Wilhelm Reich, in James Lee Christian Philosophy : An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, (2005), p. 556.
  • The god of many cannot remain the true god.
  • Is it possible that there are people who say "God" and suppose they mean something shared by all? — Only consider two schoolboys: one of them buys a knife, and the other buys an identical one on the same day. And a week later, they show each other the two knives, and they turn out to be only remotely similar, so differently have they been shaped by different hands. ... Is it possible to believe we could have a god without making use of him?
  • A thought struck me abruptly: My God, you do exist, then. There are proofs of Your existence. I had forgotten them all, and never demanded any either, for what an overwhelming obligation would come with this certainty. And yet that is what is now being shown to me.
  • When I speak of All That Is, you must understand my position within it. All That Is knows no other. This does not mean that there may not be more to know. It does not mean, and here words quite fail us, it does not mean that All That Is, in any terms we can conceive of, may not be limited. It knows of no other.
  • If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.
  • If you do not know your heart, you do not know your God.
  • I think I’ve gone through quite an ordinary series of steps in life. I began as most children began, with God and Santa Claus and the tooth fairy and the Easter Bunny all being about the same thing. Then I went through the things that I think sensitive people go through, wrestling with the thoughts of Jesus—did he shit? Did he screw? I began to dare to believe that God wasn’t some white beard. I began to look upon the miseries of the human race and to think God was not as simple as my mother said. As nearly as I can concentrate on the question today, I believe I am God; certainly you are, I think we intelligent beings on this planet are all a piece of God, are becoming God. In some sort of cyclical non-time thing we have to become God, so that we can end up creating ourselves, so that we can be in the first place. ... My own feeling is that relation to God as a person is a petty, superstitious approach to the All, the infinite.
  • We must question the story logic of having an all-knowing all-powerful God, who creates faulty Humans, and then blames them for his own mistakes.
  • I do not belong to any church, but I do consider myself a religious man...part of the creative and intelligence behind life. Therefore, if we are part of God than our lives are not brief meaningless things, but rather have a great importance and significance.
  • Also, if you read attentively and objectively the "Letter about God": in The Mahatma Letters, you will see that the Mahatma repudiates the sacrilegious and anthropomorphic conception of a Personal god—cruel and unjust, chastising with eternal damnation all so-called heretics, and justifying all the crimes committed in his Holy Name! Verily, such a God cannot have a Mahatma's approval and respect.
  • Its Humanity develops fully only in the Fourth—our Fourth—our present Round. Up to this fourth Life-Cycle, it is referred to as 'humanity' only for lack of a more appropriate term. Like the grub which becomes chrysalis and butterfly, Man, or rather that which becomes man, passes through all the forms and kingdoms during the first Round and through all the human shapes during the two following Rounds... During the three Rounds to come, Humanity, like the globe [planet] on which it lives, will be ever tending to reassume its primeval form, that of a Dhyan-Chohanic Host. Man tends to become a God and then—GOD, like every other atom in the Universe...
  • The Ruling Principle of the Universe is one of Harmony and Love—God is Love. Therefore, if we wish to embody the most ancient axiom, "as above, so below," we should become unified precisely upon this principle of love and should be subordinate to it, regarding it as our only boundless Ruler.
  • By propagating the dogma of Jesus Christ as the only begotten Son of God, the Church contradicts the very sense of the prayer given to us by Jesus Christ himself, "Our Father which art in heaven." And also the words of the Scriptures, "So God created man in his own image." (Genesis 1:27)
  • Verily, there is nothing more sacrilegious for human consciousness than to limit the Ineffable Grandeur of the Divine Principle that is poured out over the entire Universe. Assuredly, from this monstrous, ignorant belittling issue all the unworthy concepts of God. Man, in his conceit, tries to bring everything down to his own level and likeness... Indeed, the books of the Teaching are full of concepts of the Divine Principle, or God, and of Spirit and spirituality.
  • The God in us is the sole reality; all else, as beautifully and poetically expressed by the East, is but the "Play of the Great Mother of the World."...There is no God, or Gods, who was not at some time a man.
  • In the presence of infinite might and infinite wisdom, the strength of the strongest man is but weakness, and the keenest of mortal eyes see but dimly.
    • Theodore Roosevelt's Christian Citizenship Address before the Young Men's Christian Association, Carnegie Hall, New York (30 December 1900)
  • Kill one man and you are a murderer. Kill millions and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone and you are a God.
  • If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.
  • If there were a God, I think it very unlikely that he would have such an uneasy vanity as to be offended by those who doubt his existence.
  • Pragmatists explained that Truth is what it pays to believe. Historians of morals reduced the Good to a matter of tribal custom. Beauty was abolished by artists in a revolt against the sugary insipidities of a philistine epoch and in a mood of fury in which satisfaction is to be derived only from what hurts. And so the world was swept clear not only of God as a person but of God's essence as an ideal to which man owed an ideal allegiance.

S

 
[In Hinduism] There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendant God includes all possible Gods… ~ George Bernard Shaw
 
Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner. ~ Baruch Spinoza
  • I think that if there were a God, there would be less evil on this earth. I believe that if evil exists here below, then either it was willed by God or it was beyond His powers to prevent it. Now I cannot bring myself to fear a God who is either spiteful or weak. I defy Him without fear and care not a fig for his thunderbolts.
    • Marquis de Sade, Justine or The Misfortunes of Virtue (1787) [This quote is strikingly similar to Epicurus' above.]
  • The existence of the world without God seems to me less absurd than the presence of a God, existing in all his perfection, creating an imperfect man in order to make him run the risk of Hell.
  • Respectable society believed in God in order to avoid having to speak about him.
  • Gott werden, Mensch sein, sich bilden, sind Ausdrücke, die einerlei bedeuten.
    • To become God, to be human, to cultivate oneself are all expressions that mean the same thing.
      • Friedrich Schlegel, Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Athenaeum Fragments” § 262
  • There are as many gods as there are ideals. And further, the relation of the true artist and the true human being to his ideals is absolutely religious. The man for whom this inner divine service is the end and occupation of all his life is a priest, and this is how everyone can and should become a priest.
  • In saying we are in immediate relation with God, the latter term is used only to designate the Whence of our spontaneous and receptive life, of which we become aware in our feeling of absolute dependence.
  • “Were you not at the Holy City when the army of the faithful burst in? Did you not yourself partake in the slaughter of the pagans, and the women and infants of the pagans, those who were born in lands where the gospel never reached? Did you not do this and much more, all for the glory of God? And does not that same All Mighty and All Merciful God damn men for sins of weakness and ignorance when He himself made them imperfect and prone to weakness, and taught them not so that they remained ignorant? Did He not allow the serpent to enter the Garden, make no move to stop it, then punish severely his beguiled servants?”
    “Lady, as you said, you know the answers. All these things are true.”
    “Then I ask you, Julian, are these actions of a loving God?”
    “I—I—don’t—”
    “Know! But you do. This knowledge is the heritage of all men. You know they are not, and yet more shall you know. God is mad, Julian. He babbles on his throne of light, and the sound of his gurgling fills his angels with fear. He sends them forth with flaming swords to raze the cities of men, and when thousands upon thousands have been slain, and the smoke of their pyres rises into the heights of the sky, when pestilence and famine slay thousands more, then God laughs and roars like some mindless beast, ‘THIS IS PLEASING TO ME!’”
  • I can see him. I know that God is real. I know it in my heart. You can only believe in what you know to be true. You know your own truth. I know mine. Everyone should be able to find that within themselves... I want to live my life for God, and let other people take from that whatever they want.
  • I think the destiny of all men is not to sit in the rubble of their own making but to reach out for an ultimate perfection which is to be had. At the moment, it is a dream. But as of the moment we clasp hands with our neighbor, we build the first span to bridge the gap between the young and the old. At this hour, it’s a wish. But we have it within our power to make it a reality. If you want to prove that God is not dead, first prove that man is alive.
    • Rod Serling seech at Moorpark College, Moorpark, California (3 December 1968)
  • You have in yourself some thing similar to God, and therefore use yourself as the temple of God, on account of that which in you resembles God.
  • The greatest honor which can be paid to God is to know and imitate him.
  • Consider lost all the time in which you do not think of divinity.
  • A good intellect is the choir of divinity.
  • You should not dare to speak of God to the multitude.
  • He who is worthy of God is also a god among men.
  • He best honors God who makes his intellect as like God as possible.
  • Had I but serv'd my God with half the zeal
    I serv'd my king, He would not in mine age
    Have left me naked to mine enemies.
    • William Shakespeare, Henry VIII (c. 1613), Act III, scene 2, lines 455–57. Cardinal Wolsey is speaking to his servant, Cromwell. During the Watergate hearings on June 12, 1973, Senator Sam Ervin quoted these words to Herbert Porter.
  • Beware of the man whose god is in the skies.
  • The apparent multiplicity of Gods [in Hinduism] is bewildering at the first glance; but you presently discover that they are all the same one God in different aspects and functions and even sexes. There is always one uttermost God who defies personification. This makes Hinduism the most tolerant religion in the world, because its one transcendant God includes all possible Gods… In fact Hinduism is so elastic and so subtle that the profoundest Methodist and the crudest idolator are equally at home in it.
  • If he is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him?
    If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?
    If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers?
    If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him?
    If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses?
  • Tacitus says, that the Jews held God to be something eternal and supreme, neither subject to change nor to decay; therefore, they permit no statues in their cities or their temples. The universal Being can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences. Where indefiniteness ends, idolatry and anthropomorphism begin.
  • If we find great difficulty from its admirable arrangement in conceiving that the Universe has existed from all eternity, and to resolve this difficulty suppose a Creator, how much more clearly must we perceive the necessity of this very Creator’s creation whose perfections comprehend an arrangement far more accurate and just.
  • Here was a beast for whom there could be no predator. What better definition of God is there than that?
  • Doesn’t that sound like God to you? This big stupid, invulnerable thing that resembles us and whose creations are more intelligent than it is? The Bible left out that part, but it would explain a great deal.
 
For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man. ~ God as portrayed in the Book of Moses (1830), as dictated by Joseph Smith, 1:39
  • For behold, this is my work and my glory — to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man.
  • The value of a mind is measured by the nature of the objects it habitually contemplates. They whose thoughts are of trifles are trifling: they who dwell with what is eternally true, good and fair, are like unto God.
  • By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite — that is, a substance consisting in infinite attributes, of which each expresses eternal and infinite essentiality.
    Explanation — I say absolutely infinite, not infinite after its kind: for, of a thing infinite only after its kind, infinite attributes may be denied; but that which is absolutely infinite, contains in its essence whatever expresses reality, and involves no negation.
  • Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.
    • Baruch Spinoza, in Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677), Prop. 15
  • God and all attributes of God are eternal.
    • Baruch Spinoza, in Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677), Prop. 19
  • Individual things are nothing but modifications of the attributes of God, or modes by which the attributes of God are expressed in a fixed and definite manner.
    • Baruch Spinoza, in Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677), Prop. 25
  • God is the indwelling and not the transient cause of all things.
    • Baruch Spinoza, in Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677)
  • Things could not have been brought into being by God in any manner or in any order different from that which has in fact obtained.
    • Baruch Spinoza, in Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (1677)
  • "We are willing to worship a God only if God makes us safe. Thus you get the silly question, How does a good God let bad things happen to good people? Of course, it was a rabbi who raised that question, but Christians took it up as their own. Have you read the Psalms lately? We're seeing a much more complex God than that question gives credit for."
    • Stanley Hauerwas from the Chronicle for Higher Education, The Chronicle Review, "A Complex God" September 28, 2001 The Chronicle Review Page: B6
  • The universe is God’s son.
    • Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun (1999) “God’s Son” (Sequence: “Is It Possible to Write a Poem”)

T

 
God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.
God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter. ~ Leo Tolstoy
 
God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love in all he doeth,
Love, a brilliant fire, to gladden or consume... ~ Martin Farquhar Tupper
 
Here below, God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul. ~ Gustave Thibon
  • Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.
    • Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds (1916); paraphrased variant: Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of humanity.
  • It is a mistake to suppose that God is only, or even chiefly, concerned with religion.
  • If God is truly powerful, He would not let this plague go on.
  • Here below, God is the feeblest and most destitute of beings; his love, unlike that of idols, does not fill the carnal part of the soul.
  • Man’s basic anxiety … drives the anxious subject to establish objects of fear. Anxiety strives to become fear, because fear can be met by courage. … Horror is ordinarily avoided by the transformation of anxiety into fear of something, no matter what. The human mind is not only, as Calvin has said, a permanent factory of idols, it is also a permanent factory of fears—the first in order to escape God, the second in order to escape anxiety. … But ultimately the attempts to transform anxiety into fear are vain. The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself.
  • What, but God?
    Inspiring God! who boundless Spirit all,
    And unremitting Energy, pervades,
    Adjusts, sustains, and agitates the whole.
  • The word God has become empty of meaning through thousands of years of misuse... I mean that people who have never even glimpsed the realm of the sacred, the infinite vastness behind that word, use it with great conviction, as if they knew what they are talking about. Or they argue against it, as if they knew what it is that they are denying. This misuse gives rise to absurd beliefs, assertions, and egoic delusions, such as "My or our God is the only true God, and your God is false," or Nietzsche's famous statement "God is dead." The word God has become a closed concept. The moment the word is uttered, a mental image is created, no longer, perhaps, of an old man with a white beard, but still a mental representation of someone or something outside you, and, yes, almost inevitably a male someone or something. Neither God nor Being nor any other word can define or explain the ineffable reality behind the word, so the only important question is whether the word is a help or a hindrance in enabling you to experience That toward which it points. Does it point beyond itself to that transcendental reality, or does it lend itself too easily to becoming no more than an idea in your head that you believe in, a mental idol?
  • A word is no more than a means to an end. Its an abstraction. Not unlike a signpost, it points beyond itself. The word honey isn't honey. You can study and talk about honey for as long as you like, but you won' t really know it until you taste it. After you have tasted it, the word becomes less important to you. You won't be attached to it anymore. Similarly, you can talk or think about God continuously for the rest of your life, but does that mean you know or have even glimpsed the reality to which the word points?
  • If, for whatever reason, you disliked the word honey, that might prevent you from ever tasting it. If you had a strong aversion to the word God which is a negative form of attachment, you may be denying not just the word but also the reality to which it points. You would be cutting yourself off from the possibility of experiencing that reality. All this is, of course, intrinsically connected with being identified with your mind. So, if a word doesn't work for you anymore, then drop it and replace it with one that does work. If you don't like the word sin, then call it unconsciousness or insanity. That may get you closer to the truth, the reality behind the word, than a long-misused word like sin, and leaves little room for guilt.
  • It has been said:”Stillness is the language God speaks, and everything else is a bad translation.” Stillness is really another word for space. Becoming conscious of stillness whenever we encounter it in our lives will connect us with the formless and timeless dimension within ourselves, that which is beyond thought, beyond ego.
    • Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, (2005)
  • “I want to know the mind of God,” Einstein said. “The rest are details.” What is the mind of God? Consciousness. What does it mean to know the mind of God? To be aware. What are the details? Your outer purpose, and whatever happens outwardly.
    • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)
  • The word enthusiasm comes from ancient Greek – en and theos meaning God. And the related word enthousiazein means "to be possessed by a god.” With enthusiasm you will find that you don't have to do it all by yourself. In fact, there is nothing of significance that you can do by yourself. Sustained enthusiasm brings into existence a wave of creative energy, and all you have to do then is “ride the wave.”
    • Eckhart Tolle, in A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (2005)
  • What is God? The eternal One Life underneath all the forms of life.
    • Eckhart Tolle in [A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, p. 98, (2005)
  • Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and eternal source.
  • God is that infinite All of which man knows himself to be a finite part.
    God alone exists truly. Man manifests Him in time, space and matter.     The more God's manifestation in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more man exists. This union with the lives of other beings is accomplished through love.
    God is not love, but the more there is of love, the more man manifests God, and the more he truly exists...
    We acknowledge God only when we are conscious of His manifestation in us.
  • Why is it when we talk to God we're said to be praying — but when God talks to us, we're said to be schizophrenic?
  • To be right with God has often meant to be in trouble with men.
  • I am what you call "The World". Or perhaps "The Universe". Or perhaps "God". Or perhaps "Truth". Or perhaps "Everything". Or perhaps "One". And, I am "You".
    • Truth Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood
  • God, from a beautiful necessity, is Love in all he doeth,
    Love, a brilliant fire, to gladden or consume    :
    The wicked work their woe by looking upon love, and hating it:
    The righteous find their joys in yearning on its loveliness for ever.
  • Satan: There is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a Dream, a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And You are but a Thought — a vagrant Thought, a useless Thought, a homeless Thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities.

U

 
In God We Trust. ~ United States of America national motto
 
All men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. ~ United States Declaration of Independence
  • We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,--That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

V

  • I looked to find a man who walked with God,
    Like the translated patriarch of old;—
    Though gladdened millions on His footstool trod,
    Yet none with him did such sweet converse hold;
    I heard the wind in low complaint go by
    That none his melodies like him could hear;
    Day unto day spoke wisdom from on high,
    Yet none like David turned a willing ear;
    God walked alone unhonored through the earth;
    For Him no heart-built temple open stood,
    The soul forgetful of her nobler birth
    Had hewn him lofty shrines of stone and wood,
    And left unfinished and in ruins still
    The only temple he delights to fill.
  • For the Mohammedans, it is impossible to have this idea of God as a child; they will shrink from it with a kind of horror. But the Christian and the Hindu can realise it easily because they have the baby Jesus and the baby Krishna.
    • Swami Vivekananda, Complete works (3.96)
  • I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: "O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous." And God granted it.
    • Voltaire, in a letter to Étienne Noël Damilaville (16 May 1767)
  • "If God did not exist, He would have to be invented." But all nature cries aloud that he does exist: that there is a supreme intelligence, an immense power, an admirable order, and everything teaches us our own dependence on it.
  • I cannot imagine how the clockwork of the universe can exist without a clockmaker.
    • Voltaire, as quoted in More Random Walks in Science : An Anthology (1982) by Robert L. Weber, p. 65
  • It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us.

W

 
To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist. ~ Simone Weil
 
Dear God … Everyone I know admits they’ve never seen your face, they’re not sure where you live and have no map to the place. ~ Dawud Wharnsby
 
"Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still. ~ Robert Anton Wilson
 
I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
  • God's greatness and goodness are measured by the fact that he gives us choices. He doesn't require us to thank him for our food. (In case you hadn't noticed.) God is not a Modernist. He doesn't view us as nails. God expects us to behave like carpenters. Indeed, he gave us a carpenter as an example.
    So I think God is postmodern. He has his own ideas of what rules, and what sucks, and he doesn't expect everyone else to agree with him.
  • For modern man, … pride reveals itself in impatience, which is an unwillingness to bear the pain of discipline. … In effect his becomes a deification of his own will; man is not making himself like a god but is taking himself as he is and putting himself in the place of God.
  • The first thing that we know about ourselves is our imperfection.
This is what Descartes meant when he said: 'I know God before I know myself.'
The only mark of God in us is that we feel that we are not God.
  • In order to obey God, one must receive his commands. How did it happen that I received them in adolescence, while I was professing atheism? To believe that the desire for good is always fulfilled — that is faith, and whoever has it is not an atheist.
  • No human being escapes the necessity of conceiving some good outside himself towards which his thought turns in a movement of desire, supplication, and hope. consequently, the only choice is between worshipping the true God or an idol. Every atheist is an idolater — unless he is worshipping the true God in his impersonal aspect. The majority of the pious are idolaters.
  • There are two atheisms of which one is a purification of the notion of God.
    • Simone Weil, as quoted in The New Christianity (1967) edited by William Robert Miller
  • No man — prince, peasant, pope, — has all the light, who says else is a mountebank. I claim no private lien on truth, only a liberty to seek it, prove it in debate, and to be wrong a thousand times to reach a single rightness. It is that liberty they fear. They want us to be driven to God like sheep, not running to him like lovers, shouting joy!"
  • Ever since the Greeks, we have been drunk with language! We have made a cage with words and shoved our God inside!
  • If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.
  • Once you accept the existence of God — however you define him, however you explain your relationship to him — then you are caught forever with his presence in the center of all things. You are also caught with the fact that man is a creature who walks in two worlds and traces upon the walls of his cave the wonders and the nightmare experiences of his spiritual pilgrimage.
  • To assume that one’s existential task is completed when the individual is brought into right relation with society, that is, when the individual has been socialized, is to absolutize society and confuse society with God.
  • Dear God I've heard your name from teachers, family and friends, you made the universe and so will live on when it ends. Everyone I know admits they’ve never seen your face, they’re not sure where you live and have no map to the place.
    • Dawud Wharnsby, in "Dear God", in A Picnic of Poems in Allah's Green Garden (2011)
  • No reason can be given for the nature of God, because that nature is the ground of rationality.
  • The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.
    • Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (1925), Chapter XII. New York: Mentor Books, 1948, p. 192
  • Lucifer: God? God is love. I don't love you.
  • All your Western theologies, the whole mythology of them, are based on the concept of God as a senile delinquent.
  • "Elohim," the name for the creative power in Genesis, is a female plural, a fact that generations of learned rabbis and Christian theologians have all explained as merely grammatical convention. The King James and most other Bibles translate it as "God," but if you take the grammar literally, it seems to mean "goddesses." Al Shaddai, god of battles, appears later, and YHWH, mispronounced Jehovah, later still.
    • Robert Anton Wilson, Everything Is Under Control : Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-Ups (1998), p. 197
  • To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
    To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
    To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
  • God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.
    • Frank Lloyd Wright, quoted in Truth Against the World : Frank Lloyd Wright speaks for an organic architecture (1987) edited by Patrick J. Meehan
  • Maybe the growth of "God" signifies the existence of God. That is: if history naturally pushes people toward moral improvement, toward moral growth, and their God, as they conceive their God, grows accordingly, becoming morally richer, then maybe this growth is evidence of some higher purpose, and maybe — conceivably — the source of that purpose is worthy of the name divinity.[… I]f it is a natural outgrowth of history — then it is more likely that this "growth of God" signifies the existence of God, or at least the existence of something you might call divine, however unlike ancient conceptions of God.
  • Is God love? Like all characterizations of God, this one presumes more insight than I feel in possession of. But there's certainly something to the idea that love is connected to, indeed emanates from, the kind of God whose existence is being surmised here.
    The connection comes via love's connection to the moral order of which that God is the source. The moral order has revealed itself through ever-widening circles of non-zero-sumness that draw people toward the moral truth that mutual respect is warranted. As we saw […], it is the moral imagination whose growth often paves the way for that truth, and it does so through the extension of a kind of sympathy, a subjective identification with the situation of the other. And as sympathy intensifies it approaches love. Love, you might say, is the apotheosis of the moral imagination; it can foster the most intimate identification with the other, the most intense appreciation of the moral worth of the other.

X

Y

  • They who deny God have not seen Him.
    • Agni Yoga, Leaves of Morya’s Garden: Book One: The Call, 12, (1924)
  • The gods of all pagan faiths have been allied with the rich rulers. The priests of most religions are the employees of the landowners. But the God of Israel has always claimed to be with the poor—whether in the legislation of Deuteronomy, the words of the prophets, or the experiences of the New Testament. Our God is on the side of the poor.
  • A God all mercy is a God unjust.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night IV, line 234
  • By night an atheist half believes in God.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night V, line 177
  • A Deity believed, is joy begun;
    A Deity adored, is joy advanced;
    A Deity beloved, is joy matured.
    Each branch of piety delight inspires.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night VIII, line 720
  • A God alone can comprehend a God.
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night LX, line 835
  • Thou, my all!
    My theme! my inspiration! and my crown!
    My strength in age—my rise in low estate!
    My souls ambition, pleasure, wealth!—my world!
    My light in darkness! and my life in death!
    My boast through time! bliss through eternity!
    Eternity, too short to speak thy praise!
    Or fathom thy profound of love to man!
    • Edward Young, Night Thoughts (1742-1745), Night IV, line 586

Z

  • Arthur Frayn: "And you, poor creatures, who conjured you out of the clay? Is God in show business, too?"

Bible

The Bible on Wikisource
 
Thou shalt be perfect with the Lord thy God. ~ Moses
 
As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. ~ Isaiah
 
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. ~ John the Evangelist
 
God is not a man. ~ Balaam
  • In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.
  • God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good?
  • Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions, I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD. Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I unto you.
  • Thine, O Lord is the greatness, and the power, and the glory, and the victory, and the majesty: for all that is in the heaven and in the earth is thine; thine is the kingdom, O Lord, and thou art exalted as head above all. Both riches and honour come of thee, and thou reignest over all; and in thine hand is power and might; and in thine hand it is to make great, and to give strength unto all. Now therefore, our God, we thank thee, and praise thy glorious name.
  • God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things that are mighty.
  • I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase.
  • The hair of his head was like clean wool. His throne was flames of fire; its wheels were a burning fire. There was a stream of fire flowing and going out from before him. There were a thousand thousands that kept ministering to him, and ten thousand times ten thousand that kept standing right before him. The Court took its seat, and there were books that were opened.
  • How many things you have done,
O Jehovah my God,
Your wonderful works and your thoughts toward us.
None can compare to you;
If I were to try to tell and speak of them,
They would be too numerous to recount!
  • Yes, God is greater than we can know;
The number of his years is beyond comprehension.
He draws up the drops of water;
They condense into rain from his mist;
Then the clouds pour it down;
They shower down upon mankind.
  • And the LORD said unto him, "Who hath made man's mouth? or who maketh the dumb, or deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? have not I the LORD? Now therefore go, and I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say."
  • God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.
  • Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain; for the LORD will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
    • Exodus 20:7, (KJV)
    • Similar phrase: "Keep yourselves from evil to take the name of the Lord in vain, for I am the Lord your God, even the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob."
    • Doctrine and Covenants 136:21
  • See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god besides Me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of My hand. For I lift up My hand to heaven, and say, I live for ever. If I whet My glittering sword, and Mine hand take hold on judgment; I will render vengeance to Mine enemies, and will reward them that hate Me.
  • I am the LORD, and there is none else, there is no God beside me: I girded thee, though thou hast not known me: That they may know from the rising of the sun, and from the west, that there is none beside me. I am the LORD, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create calamity: I the LORD do all these things.
    • Isaiah 45:5-7 (King James Version)
    • Variant: I am the Lord and there is no other. Who forms light and creates darkness, Who makes peace and creates calamity; I am the Lord, who makes all these.
  • As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.
  • For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life
  • You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
  • For the invisible things of him since the creation of the world are clearly seen, being perceived through the things that are made, even his everlasting power and divinity; that they may be without excuse.
  • What if some did not believe? shall their unbelief make the faith of God without effect? God forbid: yea, let God be true, but every man a liar; as it is written, That thou mightest be justified in thy sayings, and mightest overcome when thou art judged.
    But if our unrighteousness commend the righteousness of God, what shall we say? Is God unrighteous who taketh vengeance? (I speak as a man) God forbid: for then how shall God judge the world? For if the truth of God hath more abounded through my lie unto his glory; why yet am I also judged as a sinner? And not rather, (as we be slanderously reported, and as some affirm that we say,) Let us do evil, that good may come? whose damnation is just.
  • We conclude that a man is justified by faith without the deeds of the law. Is he the God of the Jews only? is he not also of the Gentiles? Yes, of the Gentiles also: Seeing it is one God, which shall justify the circumcision by faith, and uncircumcision through faith.
    Do we then make void the law through faith? God forbid: yea, we establish the law.
  • O the depth of God’s riches and wisdom and knowledge! How unsearchable his judgments are and beyond tracing out his ways are! For “who has come to know Jehovah's mind, or who has become his adviser?” Or, “who has first given to him, so that it must be repaid to him?” Because from him and by him and for him are all things. To him be the glory forever. Amen.
  • The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork.
  • He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
  • God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.
  • There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early.
    The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.
    The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge.
  • I had rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God, than to dwell in the tents of wickedness.
    • Psalm 84:10
    • Variant: "For I would rather be a servant in the House of the Lord than to sit in the seats of the mighty."
    • By Alben W. Barkley, addressed to a mock Democratic convention, Washington and Lee University, Lexington, Virginia (April 30, 1956), reported in Memorial Services Held in the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States, Together with Remarks Presented in Eulogy of Alben William Barkley, Late a Senator from Kentucky (1956), p. 106.
  • If God be for us, who can be against us?
  • There is no respect of persons with God.
    • Romans, 2:11; Acts 10:34
  • But will God really dwell with mankind on the earth? Look! The heavens, yes, the heaven of the heavens, cannot contain you; how much less, then, this house that I have built!

Quran

 
O mankind, It is you that have need of God, and God is the Self-Sufficient, the Praised One. If He please, He will remove you and bring a new creation. And this is not hard for God. ~ Quran
The Quran on Wikisource
Main article: Allah
  • We have not created man except that they should do worshipping.
  • al Zariat[5]
  • And (mention, O Muhammad), when your Lord said to the angels, "Indeed, I will make upon the earth a successive authority." They said, "Will You place upon it one who causes corruption therein and sheds blood, while we declare Your praise and sanctify You?" He said: Surely, I know what you know not.
  • If God helps you, there is none that can overcome you; and if He forsakes you, who is there that can help you?
  • The Inventor of the heavens and the earth. How could He have a son when He has no consort? And He created everything, and all things He knows.
  • Say: "Who is it that sustains you (in life) from the sky and from the earth? or who is it that has power over hearing and sight? And who is it that brings out the living from the dead and (brings out) the dead from the living? and who is it that rules and regulates all affairs?" They will soon say, "God". Say, "will ye not then show piety (to Him)?" such is God, your true Lord; nothing apart from the truth, but error. How then are ye turned away?

Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon on Wikisource
  • Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.
  • And again, the Lord God hath commanded that men should not murder; that they should not lie; that they should not steal; that they should not take the name of the Lord their God in vain; that they should not envy; that they should not have malice; that they should not contend one with another; that they should not commit whoredoms; and that they should do none of these things; for whoso doeth them shall perish.

Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations

Quotes reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 315-21.
  • Homo cogitat, Deus indicat.
    • Man thinks, God directs.
    • Alcuin, Epistles
  • At Athens, wise men propose, and fools dispose.
  • Man says—"So, so."
    Heaven says—"No, no."
    • Chinese Aphorism
  • God's Wisdom and God's Goodness!—Ah, but fools
    Mis-define thee, till God knows them no more.
    Wisdom and goodness they are God!—what schools
    Have yet so much as heard this simpler lore.
    This no Saint preaches, and this no Church rules:
    'Tis in the desert, now and heretofore.
  • They that deny a God destroy man's nobility; for certainly man is of kin to the beasts by his body; and, if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature.
  • From thee all human actions take their springs,
    The rise of empires, and the fall of kings.
  • O Rock of Israel, Rock of Salvation, Rock struck and cleft for me, let those two streams of blood and water which once gushed out of thy side … bring down with them salvation and holiness into my soul.
  • He made little, too little of sacraments and priests, because God was so intensely real to him. What should he do with lenses who stood thus full in the torrent of the sunshine.
  • It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.
  • Of what I call God,
    And fools call Nature.
  • A picket frozen on duty—
    A mother starved for her brood—
    Socrates drinking the hemlock,
    And Jesus on the rood;
    And millions who, humble and nameless,
    The straight, hard pathway trod—
    Some call it Consecration,
    And others call it God.
  • Nihil est quod deus efficere non possit.
    • There is nothing which God cannot do.
    • Cicero, De Divinatione, II. 41
  • God! sing, ye meadow-streams, with gladsome voice!
    Ye pine-groves, with your soft and soul-like sounds!
    And they too have a voice, yon piles of snow,
    And in their perilous fall shall thunder, God!
  • God moves in a mysterious way
    His wonders to perform;
    He plants his footsteps in the sea
    And rides upon the storm.
  • There is a God! the sky his presence shares,
    His hand upheaves the billows in their mirth,
    Destroys the mighty, yet the humble spares
    And with contentment crowns the thought of worth.
  • My God, my Father, and my Friend,
    Do not forsake me in the end.
  • 'Twas much, that man was made like God before:
    But, that God should be made like man, much more.
  • By tracing Heaven his footsteps may be found:
    Behold! how awfully he walks the round!
    God is abroad, and wondrous in his ways
    The rise of empires, and their fall surveys.
  • Too wise to err, too good to be unkind,—
    Are all the movements of the Eternal Mind.
  • God is divine Principle, supreme incorporeal Being, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Life, Truth, Love.
  • There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite Mind, and its infinite manifestation, for God is All in All. Spirit is immortal Truth; Matter is mortal error.
  • When the Master of the universe has points to carry in his government he impresses his will in the structure of minds.
  • He was a wise man who originated the idea of God.
  • Henceforth the Majesty of God revere;
    Fear him and you have nothing else to fear.
    • Fordyce, Answer to a Gentleman who Apologized to the Author for Swearing
  • Wie einer ist, so ist sein Gott,
    Darum ward Gott so oft zu Spott.
  • I know
    My God commands, whose power no power resists.
  • Some men treat the God of their fathers as they treat their father's friend. They do not deny him; by no means: they only deny themselves to him, when he is good enough to call upon them.
    • J. C. and A. W. Hare, Guesses at Truth
  • I askt the seas and all the deeps below
    My God to know,
    I askt the reptiles, and whatever is
    In the abyss;
    Even from the shrimps to the leviathan
    Enquiry ran;
    But in those deserts that no line can sound
    The God I sought for was not to be found.
  • Forgetful youth! but know, the Power above
    With ease can save each object of his love;
    Wide as his will, extends his boundless grace.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book III, line 285. Pope's translation
  • O thou, whose certain eye foresees
    The fix'd event of fate's remote decrees.
    • Homer, The Odyssey, Book IV, line 627. Pope's translation
  • Dangerous it were for the feeble brain of man to wade far into the doings of the Most High; whom although to know be life, and joy to make mention of his name, yet our soundest knowledge is to know that we know him not as indeed he is, neither can know him; and our safest eloquence concerning him is our silence, when we confess without confession that his glory is inexplicable, his greatness above our capacity and reach.
    • Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, Chapter II. 3
  • But if the sky were paper and a scribe each star above,
    And every scribe had seven hands, they could not write all my love.
    • Dürsli und Bäbeli; old public house ditty of the Canton de Soleure or Solothurn. Original in Swiss dialect. Given in Notes and Queries (Feb. 10, 1872), p. 114
  • From thee, great God, we spring, to thee we tend,—
    Path, motive, guide, original, and end.
  • The sun and every vassal star,
    All space, beyond the soar of angel's wings,
    Wait on His word: and yet He stays His car
    For every sigh a contrite suppliant brings.
  • Nam homo proponit, sed Deus disponit.
    • Man proposes, but God disposes.
    • Thomas à Kempis, Imitation of Christ, Book I, Chapter XIX. Thomas Dibdin's translation
  • O God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee.
  • All but God is changing day by day.
  • L'impossibilité où je suis de prouver que Dieu n'est pas, me decouvre son existence.
    • The very impossibility in which I find myself to prove that God is not, discloses to me His existence.
    • Jean de La Bruyère, Les Caractères, XVI
  • Sire, je n'avais besoin de cet hypothèse.
    • Sire, I had no need for that hypothesis.
    • Laplace to Napoleon, who asked why God was not mentioned in Traite de la Méchanique Céleste
  • Denn Gott lohnt Gutes, hier gethan, auch hier noch.
  • "We trust, Sir, that God is on our side." "It is more important to know that we are on God's side."
  • God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.
  • Estne dei sedes nisi terra et pontus et aër
    Et cœlum et virtus? Superos quid quærimus ultra?
    Jupiter est quodcumque vides, quodcumque moveris.
    • Is there any other seat of the Divinity than the earth, sea, air, the heavens, and virtuous minds? why do we seek God elsewhere? He is whatever you see; he is wherever you move.
    • Marcus Annaeus Lucanus, Pharsalia, IX. 578
  • Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott
    Ein gute Wehr und Waffen,
    Er hilft uns frei aus aller Not,
    Die uns jetzt hat betroffen.
    • A mighty fortress is our God,
      A bulwark never failing,
      Our helper he amid the flood
      Of mortal ills prevailing.
    • Martin Luther, Ein feste Burg. Translation by F. H. Hedge
  • I fear no foe with Thee at hand to bless;
    Ills have no weight, and tears no bitterness.
  • A voice in the wind I do not know;
    A meaning on the face of the high hills
    Whose utterance I cannot comprehend.
    A something is behind them: that is God.
  • Exemplumque dei quisque est in imagine parva.
    • Every one is in a small way the image of God.
    • Marcus Manilius, Astronomica, IV. 895
  • Quis cœlum possit nisi cœli munera nosse?
    Et reperire deum nisi qui pars ipse deorum est?
    • Who can know heaven except by its gifts? and who can find out God, unless the man who is himself an emanation from God?
    • Marcus Manilius, Astronomica, II. 115
  • One sole God;
    One sole ruler,—his Law;
    One sole interpreter of that law—Humanity.
  • Too wise to be mistaken still
    Too good to be unkind.
  • Who best
    Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best: his state
    Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed,
    And post o'er land and ocean without rest.
  • Gott-trunkener Mensch.
  • Trumpeter, sound for the splendour of God!
    . . . . . .
    Trumpeter, rally us, up to the heights of it!
    Sound for the City of God.
  • Est deus in nobis; et sunt commercia cœli.
    • There is a God within us and intercourse with heaven.
    • Ovid, Ars Amatoria, Book III. 549. (Milton's "Looks commercing with the skies" said to be inspired by this phrase)
  • Est deus in nobis: agitante calescimus illo.
    • There is a God within us, and we glow when he stirs us.
    • Ovid, Fasti, Book VI. 6
  • Sed tamen ut fuso taurorum sanguine centum,
    Sic capitur minimo thuris honore deux.
    • As God is propitiated by the blood of a hundred bulls, so also is he by the smallest offering of incense.
    • Ovid, Tristium, II. 75
  • Nihil ita sublime est, supraque pericula tendit
    Non sit ut inferius suppositumque deo.
    • Nothing is so high and above all danger that is not below and in the power of God.
    • Ovid, Tristium, IV. 8. 47
  • One on God's side is a majority.
  • Est profecto deus, qui, quæ nos gerimus, auditque et videt.
    • There is indeed a God that hears and sees whate'er we do.
    • Plautus, Captivi, II. 2. 63
  • He from thick films shall purge the visual ray,
    And on the sightless eyeball pour the day.
  • Thou Great First Cause, least understood.
    • Alexander Pope, Universal Prayer
  • Je crains Dieu, cher Abner, et n'ai point d'autre crainte.
    • I fear God, dear Abner, and I have no other fear.
    • Jean Racine, Athalie, Act I, scene 1
  • Give us a God—a living God,
    One to wake the sleeping soul,
    One to cleanse the tainted blood
    Whose pulses in our bosoms roll.
  • We may scavenge the dross of the nation, we may shudder past bloody sod,
    But we thrill to the new revelation that we are parts of God.
  • Es lebt ein Gott zu strafen und zu rächen.
  • Nihil ab illo [i.e. a Deo] vacat; opus suum ipse implet.
    • Nothing is void of God; He Himself fills His work.
    • Seneca the Younger, De Beneficiis, IV. 8
  • Deum non immolationibus et sanguine multo colendum: quæ enim ex trucidatione immerentium voluptas est? sed mente pura, bono honestoque proposito. Non templa illi, congestis in altitudinem saxis, struenda sunt; in suo cuique consecrandus est pectore.
    • God is not to be worshipped with sacrifices and blood; for what pleasure can He have in the slaughter of the innocent? but with a pure mind, a good and honest purpose. Temples are not to be built for Him with stones piled on high; God is to be consecrated in the breast of each.
    • Seneca the Younger, Fragment, V. 204
  • God helps those who help themselves.
  • From Piety, whose soul sincere
    Fears God, and knows no other fear.
    • W. Smyth, Ode for the Installation of the Duke of Gloucester as Chancellor of Cambridge
  • Ad majorem Dei gloriam.
    • For the greater glory of God.
    • Motto of the Society of Jesus
  • The divine essence itself is love and wisdom.
  • God, the Great Giver, can open the whole universe to our gaze in the narrow space of a single lane.
  • Ha sotto i piedi il Fato e la Natura.
    Ministri umili; e'l moto e chi'l misura.
    • Under whose feet (subjected to His grace),
      Sit nature, fortune, motion, time, and place.
    • Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme, IX, 66
  • At last I heard a voice upon the slope
    Cry to the summit, "Is there any hope?"
    To which an answer pealed from that high land,
    But in a tongue no man could understand;
    And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn,
    God made himself an awful rose of dawn.
  • I fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
    I fled Him, down the arches of the years;
    I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways
    Of my own mind; and in the midst of tears
    I hid from Him, and under running laughter.
  • But I lose
    Myself in Him, in Light ineffable!
    Come then, expressive Silence, muse His praise.
    These, as they change, Almighty Father, these
    Are but the varied God. The rolling Year
    Is full of Thee.
  • The being of God is so comfortable, so convenient, so necessary to the felicity of Mankind, that, (as Tully admirably says) Dii immortales ad usum hominum fabricati pene videantur, if God were not a necessary being of himself, he might almost seem to be made on purpose for the use and benefit of men.
    • Archbishop Tillotson, Works, Sermon 93, Volume I, (1712 edition), p. 696; this is the probable origin of Voltaire's phrase.
    • Cicero's phrase from De legibus in fact references "gods" in the plural
  • Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
    Let me hide myself in thee.
    • Augustus Toplady, Living and Dying Prayer. "Rock of Ages" is translation. from the Hebrew of "everlasting strength." Isaiah, XXVI. 4
  • None but God can satisfy the longings of an immortal soul; that as the heart was made for Him, so He only can fill it.
  • I believe that there is no God, but that matter is God and God is matter; and that it is no matter whether there is any God or no.
    • "The Unbeliever's Creed", Connoisseur No. IX (March 28, 1754)
  • Si genus humanum et mortalia temnitis arma,
    At sperate deos memores fandi atque nefandi.
    • If ye despise the human race, and mortal arms, yet remember that there is a God who is mindful of right and wrong.
    • Virgil, Æneid (29-19 BC), I. 542
  • Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.
    • If there were no God, it would be necessary to invent him.
    • Voltaire, Epitre à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs, CXI. See Œuvres Complètes de Voltaire, Volume I, p. 1076. Ed. Didot, 1827. Also in letter to Frederick, Prince Royal of Prussia
      • cf. Cicero, Dii immortales ad usum hominum fabricati pene videantur.
  • Je voudrais que vous écrasassiez l'infâme.
    • I wish that you would crush this infamy.
    • Voltaire to D'Alembert June 23, 1760. Attributed to Voltaire by Abbé Barruch—Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. Generally quoted "Écrasez l'infâme." A. De Morgan contends that the popular idea that it refers to God is incorrect. It refers probably to the Roman Catholic Church, or the traditions in the church.
  • God on His throne is eldest of poets:
    Unto His measures moveth the Whole.
  • The God I know of, I shall ne'er
    Know, though he dwells exceeding nigh.
    Raise thou the stone and find me there,
    Cleave thou the wood and there am I.
    Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow,
    Too near, too far, for me to know.
    • William Watson, The Unknown God. Third and fourth lines are from "newly discovered sayings of Jesus." Probably an ancient Oriental proverb.
  • The Somewhat which we name but cannot know.
    Ev'n as we name a star and only see
    Its quenchless flashings forth, which ever show
    And ever hide him, and which are not he.
  • I know not where His islands lift
    Their fronded palms in air;
    I only know I cannot drift
    Beyond His love and care.
  • Though man sits still, and takes his ease,
    God is at work on man;
    No means, no moment unemploy'd,
    To bless him, if he can.

Anonymous

Proverbs or widely known statements by unknown authors.
  • GOD IS COMING, AND IS SHE PISSED!
    • Anonymous bumper sticker as quoted in My First Saturnalia (1981) by Michael Rumaker, p. 3
    • GOD IS COMING, AND BOY IS SHE PISSED!
      • Variant bumper sticker as quoted in River Angel : A Novel (1999) A. Manette Ansay, p. 107

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