GOD QUOTES XX

quotations about God

Nothing more shows the low condition Man is fallen into, than the unsuitable notion we must have of God, by the ways we take to please him.

WILLIAM PENN

Some Fruits of Solitude

Tags: William Penn


Many deeds are enacted in God's name which fill the Devil's heart with envy.

ABRAHAM MILLER

Unmoral Maxims


No god save self, that is the way to live ...

CONRAD AIKEN

"Youth"


The universe is just as great and amazing inside of me as outside. Immanuel Kant marveled when he looked into his own heart, as when he looked up at the sky. So the stars over me are no less sublime than my soul which mirrors them; thunder and lightning among the clouds are matched by storms of passion within me as terrible as they; my memory is a greater thing than the British Museum, for it is a living museum; my will is greater than gravitation or electricity or gunpowder, for it can use them, and they cannot budge; my imagination is more wondrous than the Vatican gallery, for its pictures come and go with instant swiftness, and my conscience is as mysterious and as majestic as the substance of God Himself.

FRANK CRANE

"The Part of Me That Doubts", Four Minute Essays

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Give God the margin of eternity to justify himself in, and the more we live and know of our own souls and of spiritual experiences generally, the more we shall be convinced that we have to do with one who is good and just.

HUGH R. HAWEIS

Speech in Season

Tags: Hugh R. Haweis


The marvels of God are not brought forth from one's self.
Rather, it is more like a chord, a sound that is played.
The tone does not come out of the chord itself, but rather,
through the touch of the Musician.
I am, of course, the lyre and harp of God's kindness.

HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

attributed, Soul Weavings

Tags: Hildegard of Bingen


There are many aspects of the universe that still cannot be explained satisfactorily by science; but ignorance only implies ignorance that may someday be conquered. To surrender to ignorance and call it God has always been premature, and it remains premature today.

ISAAC ASIMOV

"The Threat of Creationism", New York Times Magazine, Jun. 14, 1981

Tags: Isaac Asimov


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

The Fire Next Time

Tags: James Baldwin


To recognize God where and as he reveals himself is the only true bliss on earth.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE

The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe


Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God.

LEO TOLSTOY

War and Peace

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To say that the Great Companion is dead, is not to say that there is no God. The dead also live; but between them and ourselves all communion and companionship seem to most of us impossible. So to many in our own time, to many without the Church, to some within it, living companionship with a living God is an experience unknown. They believe in what Carlyle calls a "hypothetical God," but he is to them only a hypothesis. They look back through the ages for some evidence of a God who revealed himself centuries ago; they look forward with anticipation to a God who will reveal himself in some future ephiphany; but of a God here and now, a God who is a perpetual presence, a God whom they can see as Abraham saw him, with whom they can talk as Moses talked with him, who will inspire them with courage as he inspired Gideon, with hope as he inspired Isaiah, and with praise as he inspired David, they do not know.

LYMAN ABBOTT

The Great Companion


The brave-speaking Plato pronounceth that God formed the world after his own image; but this smells rank of the old dotages, old comic writers would say; for how did God, casting his eye upon himself, frame this universe? Or how can God be spherical, and be inferior to man?

PLUTARCH

"What is God?", Essays & Miscellanies

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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.

RICHARD DAWKINS

The God Delusion

Tags: Richard Dawkins


God is a witness that cannot be sworn.

SAMUEL BECKETT

Watt

Tags: Samuel Beckett


Curiously, neither God nor the devil may wear modern dress, but must retain Grecian vestments.

SINCLAIR LEWIS

Nobel Lecture, December 12, 1930


The important thing, I think, is not to be bitter. You know, if it turns out that there is a God, I don't think that he's evil. I think that the worst you can say about him is that basically he's an underachiever.

WOODY ALLEN

Love and Death


God is the only being who need not even exist in order to reign.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Fusées

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The life of God -- the life which the mind apprehends and enjoys as it rises to the absolute unity of all things -- may be described as a play of love with itself; but this idea sinks to an edifying truism, or even to a platitude, when it does not embrace in it the earnestness, the pain, the patience, and labor, involved in the negative aspect of things.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL

The Phenomenology of Spirit


Each man enters into God so much as God enters into him.

HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL

Journal Intime

Tags: Henri-Frederic Amiel


I ask no truer image of my Heavenly Father than I find reflected in my own heart -- all loving, all forgiving.

HOSEA BALLOU

Treasury of Thought